Month: July 2015
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Hitting the Road
30 July 2015. Science and Enterprise is taking a mid-Summer break starting tomorrow, 31 July, through Monday, 3 August. We’ll resume our regular posting on Tuesday, 4 August. * * *
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Trial Shows Weekly Growth Hormone Drug Effective, Safe
30 July 2015. Results of an intermediate-stage clinical trial show a drug candidate to treat growth hormone deficiency in children given once a week, works about as well as a current therapy requiring a daily injection. The results were released by Ascendis Pharma A/S, a specialty pharmaceutical company in Copenhagen, Denmark that conducted the trial.…
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Fibers Like Wool Yarn Devised from Animal Gelatin
30 July 2015. A materials science doctoral student in Switzerland developed a process for converting animal gelatin into a fiber similar to yarn from high-quality wool. Philipp Stössel, in the Functional Materials Lab at ETH Zurich, a science and technology university, led the team that published its findings in a recent issue of the journal…
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Opioid Overdose Nasal Spray Cleared for FDA Review
29 July 2015. Indivior plc, a pharmaceutical company in the U.K. specializing in addiction therapies, received notice that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration accepted the company’s new drug application and is beginning review of Indivior’s opioid overdose treatment formulated as a nasal spray. The FDA also granted Indivior, in Slough, U.K., priority review status…
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Crop Biotech Acquires Genomic Engineering Technology
29 July 2015. Calyxt Inc., a biotechnology company developing new varieties of food crops, is licensing technology from University of Minnesota for more efficient modification of plant genomes. Financial details of the agreement between Calyxt, in New Brighton Minnesota, and the university were not disclosed. Calyxt — until recently known as Cellectis Plant Sciences —…
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Patent Awarded for Fractal Connections in Implants
28 July 2015. Electronic microcircuits designed to resemble fractals in nature used in implanted medical devices received a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Patent number 9,079,017 was awarded on 14 July 2015 to physicist and materials scientist Richard Taylor at University of Oregon and Simon Brown at University of Canterbury in New…
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Computer Model Predicts Protein Binding to DNA, RNA
28 July 2015. Geneticists and computer scientists wrote a machine-learning model for predicting the way proteins bind to genetic material, and uncovering mutations causing disease. The team led by Brendan Frey with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in Toronto published its findings yesterday in the journal Nature Biotechnology (paid subscription required). Frey and other…
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FDA Clears Trial of Fibrosis Drug for Muscular Dystrophy
24 July 2015. Biotechnology company Fibrogen Inc. says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved an application to test its fibrosis drug candidate in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The company says FDA’s approval was part of a new drug application for its candidate, code-named FG-3019, already in intermediate-stage clinical trials as a therapy for…
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Allergan Acquires Depression Therapy Developer for $560M
27 July 2015. Pharmaceutical maker Allergan plc is acquiring Naurex Inc., a designer of fast-acting therapies for depression and other neurological disorders, for $560 million. The deal covers Naurex’s products now in clinical trials, with the company’s technology platform and preclinical research spun-off into a new enterprise. Naurex, a spin-off company from Northwestern University in…
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A Turbulent Two Days
25 July 2015. If you tried accessing Science & Enterprise on Thursday and Friday this week, 23-24 July, you likely encountered periods when the site was not available. Please accept our sincerest apologies for the outages. On Thursday, we ran into problems trying to update the site to the latest vesion of WordPress, the underlying…