San Francisco-based start-up Gemmus Pharma Inc. closed an angel-backed Series A funding round of $1.45 million last week. The company expects the money and the planned second tranche will take its lead compound, GP1001, to a planned 2014 investigational new drug application (IND).
Short-term, the chances of surviving a heart attack are now quite good – on the order of 90 percent. But the longer-term statistics remain grim. Within a year of a first heart attack, nearly 20 percent of victims will have a second outright heart attack, and fully half of them will have additional heart problems that stay short of a full heart attack.
Scientists from Weill Cornell Medical College have developed what they hope will turn into a novel anti-addiction strategy. In mice, they were able to prevent the effects of nicotine by treating the animals with an anti-nicotine antibody – administered via gene therapy.
BOSTON – In the mid-20th century, a cancer patient could die without ever hearing his or her diagnosis. Many doctors, in fact, considered that the ethical thing to do. Since patients had no voice in their treatments, why saddle them with the knowledge of their diseases – which, at the time, could carry considerable social stigma?
Human cells are a minority in their own body, outnumbered 10 to one by cells of the microbiome, commensal microorganisms. "Ninety percent of the DNA that we're carrying around is bacterial," Peter DiLaura told BioWorld Insight, with some viruses and fungi thrown in for good measure.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science published full details of a paper by Dutch researchers that demonstrates H5N1 avian influenza, a highly lethal but to date not very contagious strain of the flu, can acquire mutations that allow it to be spread via aerosol transmission.
BOSTON – As budgets and success rates shrink, talk tends to be of organizations becoming leaner and meaner. But at a standing-room only session on Wednesday, speakers from government and industry looked at ways to become leaner and nicer instead, in the form of so-called precompetitive collaboration.
In the biotechnology world, all eyes are on Boston and the BIO 2012 convention this week. But across the country, in San Francisco, the American Society for Microbiology is also having its annual meeting. And on Tuesday, a late-breaking session at that meeting reported the newest findings of the Human Microbiome Project.
One of the disappointments of targeted cancer therapies has been that their promise of low toxicity has not been borne out. At the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference earlier this month, Geoffrey Shapiro of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute told BioWorld Today that "alopecia" – hair loss – "and bone marrow toxicity have been replaced by diarrhea and rash" as the dose-limiting banes of therapeutic development.
Very rapid but not very specific, the innate branch of the immune system is that system's first responder. But if it doesn't work, the effects can last a lifetime.
