As evidenced most recently by Allergan plc's purchase of Tobira Therapeutics Inc. and Akarna Therapeutics Ltd., nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) are getting a lot of love from the pharma industry these days, with good reason. (See BioWorld Today, Sept. 21, 2016.)
Inhibiting an enzyme that is important for fat synthesis led tumors to shrink in preclinical models of non-small-cell lung cancer, researchers reported in the Sept. 19, 2016, online issue of Nature Medicine.
The behavioral effects of genetic mutations depend strongly on the mouse strain in which they are studied, and in some cases, the same genetic mutation can have opposite effects on behavior, such as increasing anxiety-driven behaviors in some mouse strains and decreasing them in others, researchers have found.
The PrOCTOR score, a composite score taking into account multiple features of drug candidates and their targets, could be used to predict whether a drug was likely to fail in clinical trials for efficacy reasons.
Michael Sofia, the co-discoverer of Sovaldi (sofosbuvir, Gilead Sciences Inc.), was one of three researchers to win a Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award last week. The Lasker Foundation honored Sofia, along with the University of Heidelberg's Ralf Bartenschlager and Rockefeller University's Charles Rice, "for development of a system to study the replication of the virus that causes hepatitis C and for use of this system to revolutionize the treatment of this chronic, often lethal disease."
The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced that the 2016 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award was shared by William Kaelin of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Peter Ratcliffe of the University of Oxford's Francis Crick Institute, and Gregg Semenza of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine "for the discovery of the pathway by which cells from humans and most animals sense and adapt to changes in oxygen availability."
The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation announced that the 2016 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award was shared by William Kaelin of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Peter Ratcliffe of the University of Oxford's Francis Crick Institute, and Gregg Semenza of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine "for the discovery of the pathway by which cells from humans and most animals sense and adapt to changes in oxygen availability."
By inhibiting carotid bodies, the smallest organ in the human body, researchers have been able to lower blood pressure in several different animal models. In previous work, the team had shown that carotid body hyperactivity played a role in slightly more than half of patients with hypertension, and developed a way to identify individuals who were likely to respond to carotid body modulation.
