The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said it will allow Abbott’s $5.3 billion acquisition of Alere to proceed—in return for Alere divesting itself of two product lines and three facilities associated with them. Under a proposed consent order with the FTC, which had challenged the acquisition, Alere will sell its…

A landmark study, published in Nature on August 2, 2017, has described the first timein the U.S. that CRISPR was used to repair a germline mutation in human embryos created through in vitro fertilization. The study was a collaboration between the Salk Institute, Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), and…

Technological advances such as high-throughput sequencing are transforming medicine from symptom-based diagnosis and treatment to personalized medicine as scientists employ novel rapid genomic methodologies to gain a broader comprehension of disease and disease progression. As next-generation sequencing becomes more rapid, researchers are turning toward large-scale pan-omics, the collective use of…

While working as a principal scientist at Celgene in the mid-2010s, Tomas Babak, PhD, found himself deeply frustrated with consistently failing at translational development—taking knowledge of a disease target to develop a human-compatible drug. “I got a chance to work on drugs that were going straight into phase one clinical…

Xenotransplantation pioneer eGenesis has closed a $191 million Series D financing led by Lux Capital. The proceeds will go toward advancing eGenesis’s lead candidate for kidney transplant. The company has already garnered headlines for its pig organ transplants. In March 2024, eGenesis announced the world’s first successful porcine kidney transplant…

A non-hormonal pill can improve the chances of pregnancy and live births for women undergoing assisted reproductive treatments compared with placebo, initial findings from a phase II trial show. OXO-001 is the first drug of its kind and acts to make the innermost lining of the uterus more conducive to…

A report published in 2023, estimates that over 40% of adults in the U.S. have obesity, defined as a body mass index (BMI) of over 30 kg/m2. While not everyone in this group is unwell, there is no doubt that obesity increases the risk of associated health conditions such as…

When Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold was unveiled in 2020, the new protein structure prediction program was hailed as a breakthrough that could serve as a magic bullet for the high costs and dismal failure rates in drug discovery and development. AlphaFold uses an end-to-end deep neural network trained to produce protein…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics’ Casgevy (exa-cel), a CRISPR/Cas9 gene-edited cell therapy, for the treatment of transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia (TDT) in patients 12 years and older. This is the latest sign the gene and cell therapy market is maturing. This market is…

Biological sex and gender have a large impact on the presentation of a disease, its progression, and how it is treated, but these factors have not received adequate research or clinical attention. Positive signs of change are emerging, but there is a lot that needs to be achieved before these…

Life is like the changing of seasons, each uniquely beautiful. Just as autumn leaves fall to the ground and make way for winter’s gentle snow, life has transformational cycles. The cycle of life continues through the changing seasons, like how the autumn winds strip the trees of their leaves and…

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard today announced a research alliance with Novo Nordisk in diabetes and cardiometabolic diseases. The collaboration aims to advance three programs over the next three years. Two programs will seek drug targets for specific subtypes of type 2 diabetes and the third aims to…

Kate Therapeutics (KateTx) today emerged from stealth mode with a $51 million Series A round and a deal with Astellas Pharma to develop a gene therapy for X-linked myotubular myopathy (XLMTM). “KateTx is applying novel capsid and cargo technology platforms to enable skeletal and cardiac muscle targeting and liver de-targeting. We believe…

Chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy, commonly referred to as CAR T therapy, is an intervention that uses a patient’s own cells to fight their cancer. The therapy first received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in 2017. For some patients, this meant long term remission and even cures…

The gene CIART is a major factor in the establishment of a COVID-19 infection, according to a new study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York University (NYU) Grossman School of Medicine. In the study, which appears this week in Nature Cell Biology, the researchers used multiple organoids to…