Adding to nature's repertoire through the development of both synthetic bases and synthetic amino acids is a major goal of the field of synthetic biology. This week, researchers from The Scripps Research Institute and Synthorx Inc. reported a milestone on the way to that goal.
Receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) are one of the biopharma industry's most familiar frenemies. Aberrant RTK signaling is a driver in many forms of cancer, and is targeted by dozens of inhibitors.
In mouse models, certain mutations in T cells synergized with PD-1 blockade to spur uncontrolled growth, resulting in T-cell lymphomas. Jürgen Ruland, a professor of clinical chemistry and pathobiochemistry at the German Technical University of Munich and senior author of the paper reporting the findings, told BioWorld that his team was as surprised as anyone by the results.
The peptide rhesus theta-defensin (RTD-1) was able to arrest and reverse rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in a rodent model. Theta-defensins are a class of peptides that are expressed by old world monkeys and dampen innate immunity via multiple mechanisms.
Researchers have solved the puzzle of how mesenchymal stromal stem cell (MSC) transfusions can dampen autoimmunity even though the cells themselves become undetectable soon after their administration. MSCs are bone marrow stem cells, but they do not need to engraft into the bone marrow to be effective.
Therapeutic administration of interleukin-10 (IL-10) into the cerebrospinal fluid through intrathecal gene therapy caused fatal meningitis in swine, an unexpected toxicity that had not been seen in multiple rodent experiments.
As far as gene editing technologies go, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPR, tends to suck up all the oxygen in the room.
