Month: May 2015
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Mobile App Data Provided for Chronic Pain Study
21 May 2015. Data collected by a mobile app designed to help individuals manage their pain are being provided to a research lab at York University to reveal patterns in painful experiences by the app’s users. York’s Human Pain Mechanisms Lab in Toronto, Ontario, Canada will analyze data provided by the app Manage My Pain,…
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Orphan Status Granted Eye Cancer Treatment
21 May 2015. Food and Drug Administration designated an experimental treatment for uveal melanoma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer in the eye, as an orphan drug that qualifies for incentives to expedite its development. Aura Biosciences also revealed results of preclinical tests showing the ability of its lead biologic therapy code-named AU-011 to…
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Phillips, MIT Form Health Technology Collaboration
20 May 2015. Electronics manufacturer Royal Phillips and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are collaborating on research into health care technology and digital urban lighting systems. The 5-year, $25 million agreement also includes moving the company’s North American research and development center to Cambridge, Massachusetts near the MIT campus. Phillips, headquartered in the Netherlands, designs and…
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FDA Approves Four-Times-Per-Year Schizophrenia Drug
19 May 2015. Food and Drug Administration approved for sale in the U.S. a drug for controlling schizophrenia symptoms that individuals need to take only four times per year. Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of Johnson & Johnson, markets the three-month version of the drug paliperidone palmitate under the brand name Invega Trinza. Schizophrenia is a…
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Lab-On-Chip Device Captures Circulating Tumor Cells
19 May 2015. Engineers and medical researchers designed a microchip that detects clusters of circulating tumor cells that break away from tumors and can spread cancer throughout the body. The team from a joint Harvard-MIT health sciences technology program and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston published its findings yesterday in the journal Nature Methods (paid…
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National Academies to Develop Gene-Editing Guidelines
18 May 2015. National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine plan to write guidelines governing an emerging technology for editing human genomes. The initiative includes an international meeting in the fall to discuss the scientific, ethical, and policy issues associated with the technology known as CRISPR-Cas9. CRISPR, short for clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic…
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AstraZeneca Building New Biologics Plant
18 May 2015. The pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca plans to build a new facility in Södertälje, Sweden to manufacture biologic medications. The $285 million plant is expected to employ from 150 to 250 workers when it goes into operation in 2019. Södertälje is the site of AstraZeneca’s largest factory for making tablets and capsules, as well…
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Trial Shows Antibody Reduces Days with Migraines
15 May 2015. A clinical trial shows high doses of an engineered antibody reduced the number of days per month that people with a history of migraines experience migraine episodes. First findings from the intermediate-stage trial of the antibody code-named AMG334 by the biotechnology company Amgen were reported at a meeting of the International Headache…
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Oxford Establishes £300M Spin-Off Capital Fund
15 May 2015. University of Oxford in the U.K. is creating a capital investment fund to help launch spin-off companies based on research from university labs. The £300 million ($US 472 million) fund will be managed by a new enterprise, Oxford Sciences Innovation plc, which will be the university’s preferred capital financier for businesses generated…
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Sanford-Burnham, Lilly Partnering on Immune Therapies
14 May 2015. Sanford-Burnham Research Institute and Eli Lilly and Company are collaborating on discovering new therapies for immune system disorders using biotechnology tools. Financial and intellectual property aspects of their agreement were not disclosed. The partnership aims to combine Sanford-Burnham’s experience in cell communication pathways with Eli Lilly’s work in biotechnology applied to immunological…