Researchers have identified mutations in a set of proteins that predispose their carriers to preeclampsia, a complication that shows up in between 5 percent and 10 percent of pregnancies. Their work appeared in the March 22, 2011, online issue of PLoS Medicine.
Tumor cells take up much more sugar than regular cells – which is, in fact, the reason they show up on PET scans. But once they have that sugar, they metabolize it differently than regular cells do, via so-called glycolysis.
Researchers reported that they have sequenced multiple genomes of multiple myeloma tumors. The resulting genomic landscape has turned up well-known foes – but also new and unexpected ones, including mutations in BRAF, the target of Plexxikon Inc.'s melanoma drug hopeful PLX4032.
The many roles of commensal gut bacteria in the gut are by now widely appreciated. Those roles can be for better or for worse: The composition of gut bacteria affects the ability to metabolize food and so, weight. Regulation of the gut immune system affects diseases like inflammatory bowel disease. It also plays both sides of the fence in cancer, with some species contributing to colon cancer and others wreaking havoc through their metabolism of certain chemotherapies. (See BioWorld Today, Aug. 26, 2009, and Nov. 5, 2010.)
Cytokinetics Inc's lead compound, omecamtiv mecarbil, is in Phase II trials for the treatment of heart failure. In the March 18, 2011, issue of Science, researchers from Cytokinetics and colleagues at several academic institutions published details of how the drug works. Those insights may yield new treatments for heart failure as well as other diseases where muscle contraction is an issue, such as asthma.
In a double-blind, randomized controlled trial of Neurologix Inc.'s gene therapy NLX-P101, Parkinson's disease patients showed a statistically significant improvement in their scores on a scale used to measure motor symptoms six months after their surgery.
Researchers, regulatory agencies and the general public have become much more interested in funding transparency in recent years – for obvious reasons. Studies that are funded by a drug maker are, on the average, more sanguine about a given drug than those that are not.
Scientists at Isis Pharmaceuticals Inc., with both industrial colleagues from Genzyme Corp. and academic colleagues from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Harvard Medical School, have managed to improve the symptoms of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) in a mouse model of the disorder by treating the animals with an antisense oligonucleotide. The work, Frank Bennett, Isis senior vice president of research, told BioWorld Today, "sets the stage for going forward into the clinic" with the compound, which the company hopes to do later in 2011.