Researchers for Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. have published preclinical data for the company’s investigational hemophilia treatment ALN-AT3, which is currently undergoing phase I clinical testing and represents “a different approach to managing hemophilia,” senior author Akin Akinc told BioWorld Today.
There is general agreement that mental illnesses result from a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors. But decidedly more effort has gone into understanding the genetic side of the equation than the environmental one.
Using cancer cells with a molecular barcode, scientists have gained new insights into how tumors form blood vessel-like structures to feed themselves – a process known as molecular mimicry – and how they then use those structures to slip into the general circulation and seed distant metastases.
Cachexia, the weight loss and wasting that is a feature of some types of cancer, as well as AIDS and certain other diseases, was once seen as a quality-of-life issue.
Researchers have reported early data from a clinical trial that used a combination of genomics and immunotherapy to develop personalized dendritic cell vaccines for patients with metastatic melanoma.
One of the many disturbing things about Ebola is that the virus has such a large peer group. That peer group begins with its filovirus cousin, Marburg virus, and moves to the still closely related Arena viruses to viruses that are genetically not all that similar, but as bad or worse from a public health perspective – for example, the coronaviruses MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV.
New findings may take the art of repurposing one level up. By combining PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors, which are the current stars of cancer immunotherapy, with Cox inhibitors, which have a more checkered history as successful painkillers that were later found to raise the risk of heart attacks, scientists were able to enable mice to overcome a third disease – chronic viral infection.
It's been a fruitful week for Ebola vaccines, with progress reported ranging from phase III to the preclinical arena. Clinically, the first phase III efficacy trial of an Ebola vaccine got under way in Guinea this week. VSV-EBOV, which Merck & Co. Inc. licensed from Newlink Genetics Corp., is being tested in a two-step trial.
