Despite "a gap in awareness" among clinicians, Wall Street is focused on the promise of a late-stage experiment with Novavax Inc.'s F-protein respiratory syncytial virus (RSV F) nanoparticle vaccine in elderly people as the company begins another pivotal, phase III study with the drug in pregnant women, Gregory Glenn, senior vice president of R&D, told BioWorld Today. Read More
The U.S. federal government recently released its estimates of overall health care and Medicare spending growth in 2014, and the numbers are anything but hopeful for those who oppose intervention by a health care spending supervisory board. A government actuarial report indicated that Medicare spending grew by roughly 5.5 percent in 2014, which not only breaks a trend of relatively low Medicare spending growth, but also raises the specter that the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) will act to force congressional action on Medicare. Read More
Researchers at Harvard Medical School have applied the synthetic lethal approach of identifying gene interactions to bacteria, identifying a protein that was not, by itself, critical for Staphylococcus aureus survival, but sensitized the bacterium to aminoglycoside antibiotics. Read More
BOGOTA, Colombia – With a dengue vaccine on the way and double-digit growth this year, multinational pharmaceutical firm Sanofi SA has high expectations for its future in Colombia. Read More
Portola Pharmaceuticals Inc., of South San Francisco, priced a public offering of about 3.1 million shares at $48 apiece, for gross proceeds of $150 million. Read More
Egalet Corp., of Wayne, Pa., disclosed the end of its collaboration with Shionogi & Co. Ltd., of Osaka, Japan, for its abuse-deterrent, extended-release hydrocodone product. With the close of the partnership, Egalet gains worldwide rights to phase I candidate S-718632. Read More
ADC Therapeutics SA, of Lausanne, Switzerland, said it received clearance from the FDA to begin trials testing ADCT-402, an antibody-drug conjugate targeting CD19, which is overexpressed in many patients with B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Read More
One of the major unsolved problems with the gene-editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 is that it can cleave at off-target sites. Now, researchers from the Broad Institute were able to reduce off-target DNA cutting by replacing three amino acids in the Cas9 protein that cuts DNA. Read More
