Protein quality control research is “almost exclusively focused on heat shock proteins, which are ubiquitously present” up and down the evolutionary chain, Xiaolu Yang told BioWorld. But “for more sophisticated organisms, which we humans like to think we are, it’s a little odd that we still use the system that bacteria started with…. It seems like we should have something more. The TRIM system,” he added, “fills that gap.”
In good news for those who toss and turn in the night with restless legs syndrome and their bed partners, bioelectronic technology appears to reduce the disruptive and uncontrolled movement. Researchers claimed that the NTX100 tonic motor activation (TOMAC) therapy, developed by Noctrix Health Inc., has the potential to transform treatment for people with restless legs syndrome (RLS) who are resistant to medications.
Rapidai Inc. landed $75 million in a series C financing led by Vista Credit Partners. The funds will be used to fuel development of additional indications and expand market reach of its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered clinical decisionmaking and workflow support technology. With this latest round, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company has raised approximately $100 million, according to Crunchbase.
Arsenal Medical Inc. said its Neocast embolic material for neurovascular conditions was successfully used to treat its first patient. The patient was embolized as part of a first-in-human study to assess the safety and feasibility of Neocast for the embolization of brain tumors to more easily enable surgical removal.
The identification of new targets in diseases of the central nervous system (CNS) such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s – conditions which continue to have significant unmet needs – has taken a small step forward as one company, Violet Therapeutics Inc., plans to put $10.6 million in seed funding toward building out a pipeline based on technologies that elucidate the way cells interact amongst one another.
Researchers in London have cut through the complexity of the genetics underlying bipolar spectrum disorder (BSD) to discover single nucleotide polymorphisms they say are specific enough to form the basis of the first ever biomarker-based diagnostic test in psychiatry.
The growing number of drugs gaining U.S. FDA approval for Alzheimer’s disease has kept their ability to reduce amyloid beta and tau proteins in the news, but the degenerative disease is not simply a matter of tangles and deposits. A loss of synaptic plasticity and disrupted neural networks underlie the signature impairment of memory and cognition – and those, researchers showed in a recent study in Brain, can be strengthened by non-invasive stimulation that addresses the brain’s electrical dysfunction.
As quicker, more accurate ways to detect dementia becomes ever more urgent, Cumulus Neuroscience Ltd. has teamed up with the Universities of Bath and Bristol in the U.K. to further develop the Fastball electroencephalogram (EEG) test, a diagnostic test for earlier detection of Alzheimer’s dementia. With one in three people born in the U.K. today likely to develop dementia at some point in their lives, early diagnosis and treatment are essential for them to plan for their future.
With the spotlight at this week’s Alzheimer’s Association International conference firmly fixed on the first approved therapies, advances in diagnosing the neurodegenerative disease - on which effective use of new drugs will hang - attracted less attention. However, hand-in-hand with the development of anti-amyloid drugs, development of blood-based biomarkers has made significant progress and they now have the potential to form the basis of easy to access and low cost tests.
Responding to medical advances and new standards of care in Alzheimer’s, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing to end its 10-year-old coverage with evidence development policy that has limited Medicare reimbursement of amyloid PET scans to once in a lifetime for beneficiaries – and then only when they’re used in a CMS-approved trial.
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