Despite government efforts to prop up biopharma and med-tech research toward creating women’s health products, companies must eventually reach out to the private markets to bring their inventions to the next stage of development. Anna Zornosa-Heymann, a women’s health investor, serves as a part-time contractor with the U.S. NIH’s SEED (Small business Education & Entrepreneurial Development) office, where she helps companies move from government to external funding. Government funds are “excellent to pay for research … but those funds don’t allow you to build a first-class team and to develop a sales apparatus,” she told BioWorld.
While women make up half the world’s population and own two out of every five businesses, there are substantial knowledge gaps about conditions affecting their health – mostly due to decades of research excluding women from clinical trials and investment decisions.
While women make up half the world’s population and own two out of every five businesses, there are substantial knowledge gaps about conditions affecting their health – mostly due to decades of research excluding women from clinical trials and investment decisions.
Artificial intelligence might solve a world of cost issues for medical science, but the results of a recent study suggest that the day has not yet come when hospitals and doctor’s offices can just feed data into a computer and expect a reliable and intelligible diagnosis.
Researchers from Purdue University and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have identified a potential target for treating Lyme disease, a prevalent tick-borne illness of increasing concern worldwide. Current treatment for Lyme disease is based on long-term administration of broad-spectrum antibiotics, with significant costs and impact on patients’ quality of life.
Females have a much greater risk of developing an autoimmune disease than males do. Eighty percent of autoimmune disease patients are female, and specific disorders can have an even more lopsided ratio – 90% of systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus) and almost 95% of Sjögren’s disease patients are female.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health reported the launch of a network for clinical trials that will examine the utility of cancer screening tools, which will start with a pilot study of multi-cancer detection (MCD) tests.
In recent years, the U.S. Congress has come to rely unduly on continuing budget resolutions to fund government operations, and fiscal year 2024 is no exception. The current continuing resolution (CR) for the FDA budget is set to expire March 1, but there is concern that Congress will resort yet again to a CR to cover the balance of fiscal 2024, a predicament which suggests that the FDA’s appropriations may be flat relative to fiscal year 2023.
Since its founding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the scientists of the All of Us Research Program have set the goal to analyze the largest diversity of the genomic population in the country and end the under-representation of its different groups. The project has expanded the vision of several pathologies, discovered thousands of new genetic variants, redefined the risk genes for common diseases, and stratified them, uncovering eight different forms in the case of type 2 diabetes (T2D). Their results create a pathway for a new age of precision medicine.
Investigators at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disorders (NIDDK) have used a gene-constrained analysis to identify nine new Alzheimer’s disease (AD) risk genes that are possibly linked to the higher prevalence of AD in people with African ancestry. One of those genes, GNB5, regulates the stability of certain G protein-signaling proteins, which are activated by G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). The authors showed that mice with only one copy of Gnb5 developed more amyloid plaques and tau tangles than those with two copies.
