Sunbird Bio Inc. is advancing its blood-based diagnostics platform for neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkison’s disease (AD/PD), amidst new breakthroughs in the AD drug therapies and diagnostics space.

Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH partnered with Newcastle University and the University of Edinburgh to fund a £30 million (US$38 million) study into liver cirrhosis in a bid to provide scientists with new insights into liver health. The partners hope that the study will not only enhance the understanding of nonalcoholic or metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (NASH/MASH) cirrhosis, but also help identify translational biomarkers using a cutting-edge approach called single-cell RNA sequencing to accelerate the development of future therapies.

Glympse Bio Inc.’s diagnostic platform has demonstrated the ability to detect hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in blood, offering a non-invasive method for diagnosing the disease much earlier and more reliably than current approaches. The platform uses biosensors and machine learning to measure protease activity in plasma samples. Details of studies demonstrating the system’s accuracy in HCC will be presented at the International Liver Conference 2022 in London.