Connecting You to Tomorrow's Biotechnology Innovations
Researchers with the U.S. Military HIV Research Program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) report that an experimental heroin vaccine induced antibodies that prevented the drug from crossing the blood-brain barrier in mice and rats. The vaccine was co-developed at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes […]
Malaria*1 is one of three major infectious diseases*2 affecting approximately 300 million people every year, accounting for about 500,000 deaths, but effective vaccine development has not been successful. Among malaria parasites infecting humans, Plasmodium falciparum (P. falciparum)*3 causes especially severe disease. In addition, acquired immunity to malaria is inefficient, even after repeated exposures to P. […]
Michael Pulsipher, MD, of the Children’s Center for Cancer and Blood Diseases at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, along with Michael Keller, MD from Children’s National Health System in Washington, DC, have been awarded $4.8 million by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to study the use of a new T-cell therapy to help fight […]
Precision medicine clinical trial leads to approval of first treatment for Erdheim-Chester disease The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that it has approved the drug vemurafenib for the treatment of patients with BRAF V600-mutant Erdheim-Chester disease (ECD). This is the first approval of a targeted therapy based on a basket study and […]
Researchers at the University of Maryland and Duke University have designed a novel protein-sugar vaccine candidate that, in an animal model, stimulated an immune response against sugars that form a protective shield around HIV. The molecule could one day become part of a successful HIV vaccine. “An obstacle to creating an effective HIV vaccine is […]
Rheumatoid Arthritis is a chronic inflammatory disease that mainly targets the synovial membrane, cartilage and bone. It affects about 1% of the global population and is associated with significant morbidity and increased mortality. Anti-TNF related therapies are the current standard treatment of patients with advanced RA, but over half of the RA patients do not […]
Results from an early-stage clinical trial called APPROACH show that an investigational HIV vaccine regimen was well-tolerated and generated immune responses against HIV in healthy adults. The APPROACH findings, as well as results expected in late 2017 from another early-stage clinical trial called TRAVERSE, will form the basis of the decision whether to move forward […]
Scientists at the Cornell and Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research have developed a way to produce a protein antigen that may be useful as vaccine for schistosomiasis — a parasitic disease that infects millions of people, mostly in tropical and subtropical climates according to new research in the journal Protein Expression and Purifaication, June 2017. If […]
A novel vaccine therapy can generate immune responses in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCCa), according to researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The treatment specifically targets human papillomavirus (HPV), which is frequently associated with HNSCCa, to trigger the immune response. Researchers will present the results of […]
An international team based at Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) and at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, has succeeded in defining a “signature” composed of a small number of inflammatory markers that can be monitored in order to understand how a promising anti-Ebola virus vaccine stimulates the immune system. The researchers inoculated 115 volunteers with […]
A recently-published study shows how Indiana University scientists are speeding the path to new treatments for the Zika virus, an infectious disease linked to birth defects in infants in South and Central America and the United States. Cheng Kao, a professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences‘ Department of Molecular and Cellular […]
Not all melanomas are created equal. While most melanomas appear on the skin as the result of sun exposure, a small subset of melanomas arise spontaneously from mucosal tissues. And while targeted treatments and immunotherapies have dramatically improved the prognosis for many patients with sun-associated melanomas, these treatments are ineffective in the mucosal form of […]
For most vaccines to work the body needs two cell types – B cells and T helper cells – to make antibodies. B cells are the antibody factories and the T helper cells refine the strength and accuracy of antibodies to home and attack their targets. A technique that identifies these helper immune cells could […]
Beginning in the mid-1980s, an epidemic of severe invasive infections caused by Streptococcus pyogenes (S. pyogenes), also known as group A streptococcus (GAS), occurred in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. The general public became much more aware of these serious and sometimes fatal infections, commonly known as the “flesh-eating disease.” Potent cytotoxins produced by […]
The Georgia State University Research Foundation has entered into a research collaboration agreement with GeoVax Labs, Inc., a Georgia-based biotechnology company developing human vaccines, to advance development of a therapeutic vaccine for treatment of chronic Hepatitis B infections. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates between 700,000 to 1.4 million people in the United […]
Researchers find key genetic driver for rare type of triple-negative breast cancer New mouse model leads to surprising discovery that sheds light on metaplastic breast cancer For more than a decade, Celina Kleer, M.D., has been studying how a poorly understood protein called CCN6 affects breast cancer. To learn more about its role in breast […]
Over the past few decades, many bacteria have become resistant to existing antibiotics, and few new drugs have emerged. A recent study from a U.K. commission on antimicrobial resistance estimated that by 2050, antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections will kill 10 million people per year, if no new drugs are developed. To help rebuild the arsenal against […]
A first-of-its-kind study of 900,000 hospital admissions from an integrated health system has yielded insights into shifts in the epidemiology of multi-drug resistant organisms (MDROs) in the community. New research, funded by OpGen (NASDAQ: OPGN) and conducted by Intermountain Healthcare and Enterprise Analysis Corporation (EAC), found that Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) […]
Researchers have been trying for decades to develop a vaccine against the globally endemic hepatitis C virus (HCV). Now scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered one reason why success has so far been elusive. Using a sophisticated array of techniques for mapping tiny molecular structures, the TSRI scientists analyzed a lab-made version of […]
Viruses hijack the molecular machinery in human cells to survive and replicate, often damaging those host cells in the process. Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine discovered that, for cytomegalovirus (CMV), this process relies on a human protein called CPEB1. The study, published October 24 inNature Structural and Molecular Biology, […]