Lipids have long been used as drug delivery vehicles, but HighField Biopharmaceutics is repurposing lipids as drugs to fight cancer. The company’s technology platform is seeking to change the immunotherapy landscape with new treatments that are better targeted, more potent, and less toxic. We spoke to Don Wyatt, chief business officer for Highfield…

Jeremiah Robison’s daughter Sofia was born with cerebral palsy, a congenital movement disorder. Watching her physicians use body monitors to measure her gait, and later apply functional electrical stimulation as physical therapy, gave him an idea to combine the two to create a sleeve that could be worn on her leg to improve her ability to walk. Now…

Physicians treating people with burns typically incorrectly assess the depth of burn wounds in about 25 to 30 percent of cases. That, in part, is due to a lack of diagnostic tools to assess the severity of a burn and to determine the best approach to treatment. Spectral AI has developed the DeepView System, a predictive device that offers clinician…

New York City is not the first place that comes to mind when thinking of biotech clusters, but the Big Apple has been a growing center of biomedical innovation with its mix of academic research hospitals, finance, and growing number of biopharmaceutical companies. One place that’s seeking to serve as both a home to innovative companies and facilita…

Funding levels, drug launches, and R&D success rates all grew in 2023, according to a new report from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. Global funding of biopharmaceutical research and development increased to $72 billion, up from $61 billion in 2022. M&A activity jumped to $140 billion from $78 billion during the same period. We spoke to…

In January 2023, AstraZeneca agreed to acquire CinCor Pharma, the CinRx cardio-renal disease therapy subsidiary, for $1.3 billion. The deal included a potential additional $500 million milestone payment. The price represented a 121 percent premium to CinCor’s market value at the time and could grow to more than a 200 percent premium if the mileston…

Antibody-drug conjugates can deliver chemotherapy directly to tumors but more than 95 percent of the dose often ends up in healthy tissues, decreasing efficacy and increasing toxicity. Mythic Therapeutics FateControl technology improves the uptake of ADCs in cancerous cells while avoiding the release of their toxic payloads in healthy ones. This pr…

The HGF/MET neurotrophic system plays a critical role in the maintenance and repair of connections in the brain. Enhanced signaling along this pathway has the potential to reduce inflammation, slow neurodegeneration, and provide neuroprotection. Athira Pharma is pursuing small molecule drugs that target this pathway to address a range of neurodegen…

The advent of induced pluripotent stem cells, cells that can be coaxed into becoming virtually any type of cell within the body, promised to usher in a new era of regenerative medicine and improved drug discovery. In practice, though, the ability to use these cells to develop desired cell types has proved challenging to do in a predictable way and …

Some 100 trillion gigabytes of data are created and consumed each year, an amount that is expected to double by 2025. The demand for data storage carries the need for significant physical space and power requirements in the form of digital data centers. DNA, though, may represent a solution to what some see as unsustainable growth with environmenta…

People tend to think of each person having their own unique genome. Quotient Therapeutics is taking an approach to drug discovery based on the reality that from cell to cell within a given individual, there can be trillions of divergent genomes. Changes in cells throughout the body can alter how a cell responds to disease and point to new ways to c…

Regardless of the cause of a disease, most diseases involve gene dysregulation. Omega Therapeutics is developing a new class of programmable, epigenomic, mRNA medicines designed to make specific epigenetic changes and correct abnormal gene expression to treat or cure diseases. We spoke to Mahesh Karande, president and CEO of Omega Therapeutics, abo…

The effects of spinal cord injury extend beyond the loss of mobility. They can include a toll on mental health, a feeling of exclusion, and a general decline in the quality of life as a result of being able to stand and interact eye-to-eye with others. ReWalk Robotics’ Personal Exoskeleton is configured to an individual’s body and enables someone w…

Mitochondria are often referred to as the “powerhouses” of the cell, but as scientists gain a greater understanding of these essential organelles, they are coming to discover they play a more expansive role in health and disease. The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health named Navdeep Chandel a co-recipient of the 2023 Lurie Prize in Bio…

Sandbox AQ, the Alphabet spin-out backed with $500 million in investment, in June 2023 unveiled it AQBioSim division. The division is working to bring SandoxAQ’s AI and quantum-inspired computing to develop new treatments for intractable medical conditions including neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. The company is working with leading drug dev…

It’s long been understood that chromosomal instability (CIN) is a characteristic of cancer cells, but it also represents a key difference between cancer cells and healthy cells that can be exploited. Volastra is developing medicines for a wide range of difficult-to-treat cancers that target the vulnerabilities of these cells. We spoke to Charles Hu…

Though the year began with a banking crisis and has been marked with layoffs and restructurings, we have managed to avoid a feared recession. It’s been a big year for new drug approvals, M&A activity has been brisk, and biotech stocks have rallied in recent weeks pushing the widely watched S&P biotech index into positive territory. We continue our …

Vik Bajaj has long lived at the intersection of physical sciences, engineering, data science, and the life sciences—first as an academic working to improve diagnostic imaging at Stanford University and later as a chief scientific officer at GRAIL and Verily. Now, as a founder and CEO of Foresite Labs, the technologist turned venture capitalist is u…

Interleukin-2 therapies have been seen as promising ways to treat solid tumors, but they have proven challenging because of the ability of IL-2 to both activate and suppress the immune system. Their effectiveness has been limited because of potentially toxic side effects, which have included vascular leak syndrome and pulmonary edema. Aulos Bioscie…

Real-world data promises to provide insights that lead to better therapies, change how we treat diseases, and improve outcomes for patients. One of the limits of realizing benefits from all of the health information we are swimming in is the lack of access to high-quality data in a usable format. Verana Health has built partnerships with medical so…

Artificial intelligence promises to reshape the healthcare landscape and deliver new insights into the molecular drivers of health and wellness, provide rapid diagnoses of patients, and discover and design therapies that extend beyond human imagination. Swaroop ‘Kittu’ Kolluri, founder and managing director of Neotribe Ventures, is using his experi…

Though many drug developers are harnessing AI to create novel chemical compounds, Iambic Therapeutic’s generative AI is leveraging quantum mechanics to get to better drugs. It says its physics-informed machine learning approach has yielded promising lead candidates with superior profiles in record time. In October, Iambic completed a $100 million s…

One of the challenges with treating Alzheimer’s disease is diagnosing patients early enough in the course of its progression to have a meaningful impact with treatments. Sunbird Bio said it can accurately detect and differentiate specific proteins that aggregate and signal the presence of Alzheimer's disease, with a simple blood draw. It said its t…

About 40 percent of all drugs in the Western world are derived from plants. But challenges with producing a reliable supply inherent with materials derived from agricultural processes can lead to drug shortages as climate events, pests, and plant diseases can affect yields. Antheia is harnessing synthetic biology to produce active pharmaceutical in…

The COVID 19 pandemic provided a painful reminder of the global need to protect people against the threat of existing and emerging infectious diseases. Emergex Vaccines is developing fully synthetic vaccines that provide advantages over live attenuated and RNA-based vaccines. The company says its vaccines can provide long-lasting T cell immunity, a…