BOSTON, Mass. – KRAS used to be the poster child for undruggability. No more. Amgen Inc. and Mirati Therapeutics Inc. are in the clinic with KRAS inhibitors. Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH is planning to join them by the end of the year. And multiple other companies are moving programs forward.
Chinese researchers have developed the first green tea-triggered genetic control system for future gene- and cell-based precision medicine applications, and then used it to treat diabetes in mice and monkeys, they reported in the Oct. 23, 2019, issue of Science Translational Medicine.
Two very different roles were reported for the protein REST last week. In adults, REST activation appeared to extend lifespan by reducing overall brain activity. Principal investigator Bruce Yankner, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging, told BioWorld that in postmortem brain samples of individuals who had had no cognitive impairments at the time of their death, his team found "a correlation between down-regulation of excitation and extended longevity."
Australian scientists have discovered promising new candidate analgesic molecules derived from a Penicillium fungus, which represents a promising resource for the development of safer new analgesics, they reported in the Oct. 14, 2019, edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
A team at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT has developed a genome editing method that could, in principle, correct 90% of the roughly 75,000 currently known genomic changes that are associated with genetic diseases.
Researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania have developed an algorithm to better personalize immunotherapy treatment. The algorithm works by examining neoantigen quality, not just their quantity. Neoantigens are proteins that are the result of genetic mutations in a tumor.
Researchers from Columbia University have demonstrated that correcting mutations in the schizophrenia risk gene SetD1 in adult mice reversed cognitive impairments, suggesting that, like a number of other brain disorders, schizophrenia's malfunctions begin in early development, but remain in place via ongoing active processes rather than reaching a point of no return.
Synthetic biology is seeing rapid advances, but the medical applications have thus far remained largely elusive. But now researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have developed a tool that can track specific populations of bacteria in the gut of living organisms and document population changes over time.
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