It may be a bad environment for early stage deals for most companies. But not for start-up EnBiotix Inc., according to its CEO Jeffrey Wager. The company, which was founded in 2012, is "in discussions with multiple pharma companies" for partnering opportunities.

In the course of studying the tumor suppressor p53 and its role in both cellular aging and metabolism, scientists have described a new interaction partner of p53 that might make a better therapeutic target for the treatment of cancer than p53 itself.

You'd think that a disease that is involved in half of all deaths in the developed world would not have trouble attracting interest from the biopharma industry.

Mostly, the idea behind creating cell lines with diseases is to find ways to fix those diseases. But in the case of sickle cells – red blood cells with an abnormal hemoglobin gene – there may be a twist.

Researchers have developed an experimental drug, ABT-199, that interferes with anti-apoptotic proteins. Unlike its precursor navitoclax, though, ABT-199 does not interfere with platelet function.

For an addict, melanoma cells can be pretty picky. About half of all melanomas result from mutations in the oncogene BRAF. Such tumor cells develop a so-called oncogene addiction, becoming dependent on BRAF for their survival.

Bacteria have several ways to defend themselves against antibiotics. Out-and-out resistance through mutations in the bacterial genome is one. But there is a related phenomenon, persistence, that could perhaps best be described as "I'm not deaf; I'm ignoring you."

Transcription activator-like effector nucleases, or TALENs, were named as one of the year's most exciting developments in Science magazine's 2012 list of top scientific advances, and 2013 began with another advance in the area of genome editing.

Chemotherapy combinations, Michael Hemann told BioWorld Today, are currently determined in "a process of trial and error that has no fundamental logic, other than trying to give patients drugs that do not have the same side effects."

The FDA is your friend. Controversial as that sentiment may be among drug developers, it is the opinion of Lawrence Friedhoff, developer of Alzheimer's drug Aricept (donepezil, Pfizer Inc.) and number of other drugs.