BOSTON – For diagnosing nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), liver biopsy is "the reference standard," Dean Hum, president of Genfit Corp., told BioWorld. "I'm not going to call it the gold standard." Some of the reasons for denying biopsies a gold sticker are obvious. Biopsies are invasive, which makes them risky, expensive and loathed by patients and doctors alike. "In the real world, doctors don't always do biopsies – many say they very rarely do biopsies unless other data points in several directions and they need that for clarity," Gail Cawkwell told BioWorld.
BOSTON – At the AACR-NCI-EORTC Molecular Targets meeting in October, speakers in the second plenary session gave examples both of how far protein degradation has come as a pharmacological approach, and how far it could still go.
BOSTON, Mass. – KRAS used to be the poster child for undruggability. No more. Amgen Inc. and Mirati Therapeutics Inc. are in the clinic with KRAS inhibitors. Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH is planning to join them by the end of the year. And multiple other companies are moving programs forward.
BOSTON – Researchers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center presented encouraging, though very early, data on Merus NV's bispecific antibody MCLA-128 for the treatment of patients with NRG-1 gene fusions at the AACR-NCI-EORTC Molecular Targets meeting on Sunday.
Two very different roles were reported for the protein REST last week. In adults, REST activation appeared to extend lifespan by reducing overall brain activity. Principal investigator Bruce Yankner, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging, told BioWorld MedTech that in postmortem brain samples of individuals who had had no cognitive impairments at the time of their death, his team found "a correlation between down-regulation of excitation and extended longevity."
