Researchers from Ikarovec Ltd. have presented preclinical data for the AAV8-IKC159V, the company’s lead bicistronic gene therapy being developed for the treatment of geographic atrophy, a late stage of geographic dry AMD.

Totus Medicines Inc. has entered into a multi-target research collaboration with Eli Lilly & Co. to discover small-molecule drug candidates against undisclosed targets in different therapeutic areas.

Lift Biosciences Ltd. has been awarded a grant of over £1 million (US$1.3 million) from Innovate UK that will fund a collaboration between Lift and researchers at the University of Cambridge.

Intravitreal VEGF inhibitors are the first-line treatment for vascular retinopathies, but they are invasive, painful and require frequent treatments.

Due to the systemic nature of psoriasis, there is high risk for progressive severe forms of the disease.

Breast cancer is a heterogenous disease in terms of its prognosis and treatment response. Metabolic reprogramming is a potential therapeutic target because of its repercussion on oncogenesis.

The success of a vaccine, a gene editing design for an untreated disease, or achieving cell engraftment after several attempts, comes from years of accumulated basic science studies, thousands of experiments, and clinical trials. Innumerable steps precede hits in gene and cell therapies before a first-time revelation, and most of them are failures at the time. At the 27th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) in Baltimore last week, several groups of scientists presented achievements that years ago looked impossible.