Drug Discovery

While vaccines and pharmaceutical treatments for COVID-19 might be far off, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Colorado are exploring a stopgap measure that could buy time for critically ill patients, according to a release by the two institutions. In a clinical trial being planned for hospitals in Massachusetts and Colorado,…

A Phase 1 clinical trial for an investigational COVID-19 vaccine is underway at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. The open-label trial plans to enroll 45 healthy adults aged 18 to 55 years over a six week period. The first study participant received the vaccine yesterday. Researchers at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research…

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) said today that its Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos. has forged a partnership with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) to support coronavirus vaccine development. Janssen and the virology lab led by Dr. Dan Barouch at BIDMC have started preclinical testing of multiple vaccine prospects, with the goal of identifying a COVID-19…

Researchers at the University of Bristol (United Kingdom) are touting their use of virtual reality (VR) as a means to design and develop the next generation of drug treatments. In a published work in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers explained the use of VR in discovering new drugs by finding molecules that bind to…

IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced today that it plans to work with medical institutions and practitioners by offering support in the development of drugs to combat the recent coronavirus outbreak. The company said in a news release that it intends to leverage its IBM clinical development (ICD) system to help accelerate the development of key drugs in…

Bayer (ETR:BAYN) announced that it entered into a definitive agreement to transfer some of its small molecule research unit to Nuvisan for an undisclosed amount. The agreement is slated to lay a foundation for Nuvisan to establish the Berlin-based research unit and support Bayer’s focus on the flexibility and productivity of its research & development operating…

The FDA and U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced today that they signed a joint statement to encourage collaboration in support of a robust marketplace for biological products, including the critical adoption of biosimilars and interchangeable products. The two agencies said the statement sets out to address false or misleading promotion about biosimilars within the…

Bayer (ETR:BAYN) announced that it is entering into a collaboration agreement with artificial intelligence drug discovery company Exscientia to identify and optimize novel lead structures for potential drug candidates in treating cardiovascular and oncological diseases. The agreement, announced earlier this month, is slated to see the companies work together on early research projects combining Exscientia’s proprietary…

Verily, Google’s life science’s sister company under Alphabet (NSDQ:GOOGL), has received an FDA 510(k) clearance to include an irregular pulse monitor in its Study Watch wearable. Pharmaceutical industry giants including Novartis, Otsuka, Pfizer and Sanofi formed a strategic alliance with Verily last year to develop patient-centered clinical research programs using Verily’s Project Baseline evidence generation platform…

Avacta Group, the developer of Affimer biotherapeutics and reagents, provided an update on the Affimer therapeutics development partnership and license agreement with LG Chem Life Sciences, part of the South Korean LG Group, to develop Affimer therapeutics in several disease areas. Avacta has generated a large number of Affimer proteins that bind to the first…

Optibrium™, BioSolveIT™ and Enamine™, providers of software and services for drug discovery, today announce a three-way collaboration enabling efficient search of Enamine’s REAL Space directly from within Optibrium’s StarDrop™ software. This extension to StarDrop is powered by BioSolveIT’s proprietary Feature Trees (FTrees) technology, to search a gigantic chemical space of over 11 billion readily accessible…

LUNAC Therapeutics (LUNAC), a UK based drug discovery company focused on the identification and development of advanced anticoagulants with minimal bleeding risk, today announced it has spun out of the University of Leeds with £2.65M funding in the first close of a Series A financing round. The investment is being led by Epidarex Capital and…

Turbine, a simulation-based drug discovery company today announced the closing of an institutional financing round led by Delin Ventures. The seed fund will be used to redesign the failure-prone oncology drug discovery process into a series of rational steps facilitated by Turbine’s proprietary human cell model and simulation platform. The company’s first institutional financing round…

Dicerna Pharmaceuticals (NSDQ:DRNA) announced today that it closed a discovery & development agreement with Novo Nordisk (NYSE:NVO) worth at least $175 million to further development of therapies for treating liver-related cardio-metabolic diseases. The two companies announced the agreement on Nov. 18, 2019, outlining the plan to discover and develop the therapies using Dicerna’s GalXC RNAi platform…

Biotechnology company Triplet Therapeutics announced that it launched earlier this week with $59 million in financing as it develops ways to treat certain types of genetic disorders at their source. The $59 million includes a $49 million Series A financing round led by MPM Capital and Pfizer Ventures U.S. Co-founder Atlas Venture seeded Triplet with…

Contract research organization Veristat announced today that it completed the acquisition of Catalyst Regulatory Services, a company that provides regulatory support to biopharmaceutical firms, for an undisclosed amount. Southborough, Mass.-based Veristat said Catalyst’s combination of experience and expertise in the regulatory space will help the company implement strategies, applications, submissions and interactions with regulatory agencies…

CicloMed (Kansas City, Mo.) has expanded the Phase 1 clinical trial for fosciclopirox, its bladder cancer drug candidate. The trial has been expanded to include patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer who are ineligible to receive cisplatin chemotherapy, the company said yesterday. Researchers have enrolled the first patient at The University of Kansas Cancer Center; the…

Lunac Therapeutics (Leeds, U.K.) this week announced that it has won a U.K. innovation grant equivalent to more than $4 million to develop what it describes as an innovative anticoagulant treatment with minimal bleeding risk. The £3.14 million grant from Innovate U.K.’s Biomedical Catalyst program also went to the Medicines Discovery Catapult and the University…

It’s a feat three decades in the making: Harvard University chemists have achieved what a new paper calls a “landmark in drug discovery” with the total synthesis of halichondrin. Known to be a potent anti-cancer agent in mouse studies, and found naturally in sea sponges — though only ever in minuscule quantities — the halichondrin…

GlaxoSmithKline plc announced a five-year collaboration with the University of California to establish a state-of-the-art laboratory for CRISPR technologies, the Laboratory for Genomics Research (LGR). The new laboratory will explore how gene mutations cause disease and develop new technologies using CRISPR to rapidly accelerate the discovery of new medicines. With the recent explosion of information…

A team of UK scientists have identified the mechanism behind hardening of the arteries, and shown in animal studies that a generic medication normally used to treat acne could be an effective treatment for the condition. The team, led by the University of Cambridge and King’s College London, found that a molecule once thought only…

A scorpion native to Eastern Mexico may have more than just toxin in its sting. Researchers at Stanford University and in Mexico have found that the venom also contains two color-changing compounds that could help fight bacterial infections. The team not only isolated the compounds in the scorpion’s venom, but also synthesized them in the…

A drug that targets the immune system can delay the onset of type 1 diabetes an average of two years in children and adults at high risk, according to findings from TrialNet’s Teplizumab (anti-CD3) Prevention Study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. With 28 study sites around the world, it is the largest…

Signals between our gut and brain control how and when we eat food. But how the molecular mechanisms involved in this signaling are affected when we eat a high-energy diet and how they contribute to obesity are not well understood. Using a mouse model, a research team led by a biomedical scientist at the University…

Patients with left-sided heart failure who get implanted devices to improve the pumping of their hearts may be more likely to develop heart failure on the opposite side of their hearts if they are pre-treated with off-label selective vasodilator drugs, according to new research published in Circulation: Heart Failure, an American Heart Association journal. Between…