Rakovina Therapeutics Inc. and Variational AI Inc. have entered into a research collaboration to identify and develop novel small-molecule therapies against DNA damage response (DDR) targets for the treatment of cancer.

C4 Therapeutics Inc. has successfully delivered a second development candidate to Biogen Inc. under the companies’ 2018 strategic collaboration.

A novel gene therapy that leads to cellular rejuvenation could restore vision after non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) and glaucoma. The technique is based on a reprogramming process that reverses the epigenetic DNA alterations caused by aging. Preclinical studies in glaucoma mice and nonhuman primates (NHP) models for this stroke-like disorder that affects the eye, showed an improvement of vision and restoration of the damaged axons of the optic nerve.

Artificial intelligence (AI) drug discovery company Noetik Inc. has closed on an oversubscribed $40 million series A financing round. The company plans to use the money to expand its atlas of human cancer biology with its in vivo CRISPR platform to advance a pipeline of cancer therapeutics to the clinic. In describing its approach, the company said that making a genuine impact on drug discovery requires computational capabilities to understand and simulate disease biology at the patient level, identifying the right targets and matching them with the right therapies.

In what represents the first patenting from Munich, Germany-based Meliodys Medical UG, its co-founder and chief executive officer Simone Sabbione describes their development of a hormone-free, local pain management approach for treating dysmenorrhea, which aims to address the condition while minimizing the occurrence of side effects.

RNA Therapeutics Inc. has received a written response from the FDA to its pre-IND application questions regarding the development of its lead asset, RNAT-89 (BLA-761423), an mRNA LNP formulation to express darbepoetin.

Kytopen Corp. has received a phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant of $1.6 million from the NIAID/NIH to support preclinical studies of its engineered natural killer (NK) cells. The funding will be used to conduct in vivo preclinical studies, which will be conducted by Charles River Laboratories

Infection or cure? Scientists from Tel Aviv University and the University of Glasgow genetically modified the Toxoplasma gondii to bring a protein inside neurons. The novelty of using a protozoan that can travel from the gut to parasitize the CNS contrasts with the possibility of causing a disease. The scientists are already working on how to avoid it.

A strategy inspired by deficient HIV replication could be used as a treatment to reduce viral load in patients living with HIV and help control the pandemic of the retrovirus. Scientists from the University of California San Francisco want to use HIV against itself by using a parasitic version of the pathogen.