At the BioFuture 2024 conference held in New York in November, Seema Kumar, the CEO of Cure, described women’s health as something that has been directed at the “bikini area.” That “bikini” bias extended to both diseases and their causes – women’s health covered the breasts and reproductive system, and its causes were hormonal. Both concepts are far too narrow.

It’s difficult to fathom that the health of half the world’s population is underserved. But it’s a hard truth. There are many conditions that disproportionately impact women. Other conditions and diseases affect women in different ways than men. Decades of research excluding women from clinical trials and investment decisions in male-dominated board rooms have ignored these facts. Though an increasing number of women are now managing investments and driving the research, it’s all still woefully behind. In BioWorld’s new report, Healing the health divide, we’ve highlighted the disparities.

Six main cell types form glioblastomas (GBM), the most aggressive brain cancer due to its high rate of recurrence. Of these six, quiescent cancer stem cells are responsible for resistance to therapy and the reappearance of the tumor, according to a study that identified the six groups and highlighted the importance of these stem cells for the design of more effective therapies.

Cell and gene therapy companies are the beneficiaries of positive changes along the regulatory path that the U.S. FDA is paving for them, according to a panel of executives who spoke at the BioFuture 2024 conference in New York.

Some rare skin diseases not only reduce the quality of life of patients, but also can be devastating conditions, leading to amputations or death. At the 31st annual congress of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ESGCT), held last week in Rome, different laboratories showcased their approaches to editing mutations related to this group of diseases.

Currently, cancer therapy trial-and-error methodology is inefficient and unsustainable. Oncology is the worst therapeutic area for drug trial success; only 3.4% of drugs that enter phase I end up being FDA approved, and 57% fail due to poor drug efficacy in trials. Building tools that may aid in predicting an individual’s response to a specific therapy may help in reducing costs, guesswork, and importantly improve the outcome of patients and accelerate new drug development.

Scientists from different laboratories around the world have presented the latest advances in research into malignant brain tumors at the 31st Annual Congress of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ESGCT), which is being held Oct. 22 to 25 in Rome.

During an Innovation Ignited webinar sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, experts talked about how precision medicine has helped advance the field of oncology and how those lessons can be applied to immunology. Advancements in precision medicine have helped oncologists know which drugs are most likely to help patients as their tumors advance and mutate.

David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper share the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions to the science of protein structure. David Baker was awarded half the prize “for computational protein design,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Hassabis and Jumper shared the other half “for protein structure prediction.”

Breast cancer cells, when disseminated to other secondary organs such as the lungs, may stay in a dormant state for years, even decades. But the mechanisms that limit their expansion are not well understood. This is what researchers call a dormant mesenchymal-like phenotype (M-like) before metastasis to the lungs. Now, scientists have shown in a study published Oct. 7, 2024, in Cell, that the limiting of disseminated breast cancer cells (DCCs) to metastasize in the lungs is due to alveolar macrophages (AMs), which activate signals that make DCCs stay dormant.