Tag: university
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Needleless Delivery Start-Up Lands $11M First-Round Funding
15 October 2014. Portal Instruments Inc., a new enterprise developing needless injections for biologic therapies and other medications, raised $11 million in its first round of venture funding. Financing for the Cambridge, Massachusetts company was led by the Sunrise division of drug maker Sanofi, venture capital company PBJ Capital, and an unnamed medical device manufacturer…
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Astellas, Harvard Partner on Retinitis Pigmentosa Targets
14 October 2014. Astellas Pharma Inc. in Tokyo is collaborating with a genetics and ophthalmology lab at Harvard University to discover more about the onset of the eye disease retinitis pigmentosa and identify therapy targets. Financial details of the three-year deal with Harvard were not disclosed. Retinitis pigmentosa is a family of inherited eye disorders…
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Cancer Therapy Biotech Raises $24M in Early Funding
14 October 2014. Raze Therapeutics, a biotechnology company designing cancer therapies that stop mechanisms feeding the growth of cancer cells, raised $24 million in its first round of venture financing. The funding round was led Atlas Venture — that co-founded Raze and provided some of its seed capital — as well as MPM Capital Management,…
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Experimental Drug Kills Myeloma Cells in Lab, Trial Planned
13 October 2014. Medical researchers at Imperial College London in the U.K. developed an experimental drug that in lab and animal tests kills multiple myeloma cancer cells without the toxic side effects of other cancer drugs. The team led by Imperial medical professor Guido Franzoso published its findings today in the journal Cancer Cell, with…
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New Coating Material Stops Blood Clots, Bacterial Films
13 October 2014. Engineers and medical researchers at Harvard University developed a material to coat tubes in medical devices that repels blood, preventing clots from forming and reducing the need for blood-thinning drugs. The new material from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and collaborators at affiliated labs and hospitals is described in an…
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Stem Cells Engineered to Produce Insulin-Making Cells
9 October 2014. Researchers at Harvard University developed a technique that enables embryonic stem cells to transform into large quantities of insulin-producing beta cells found in the pancreas, a key step in developing a treatment for type 1 diabetes. The team led by biologist Douglas Melton, co-director of the university’s Stem Cell Institute, published its…
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Patent Awarded for Detailed Pandemic Flu Detection Test
8 October 2014. A genomics-based test to detect various types of pandemic influenza, including mutated forms resistant to antiviral drugs, is the recipient of a recent patent. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded patent number 8,808,993 — Methods and Kits to Detect New H1N1 “Swine Flu” Variants — to three inventors, and assigned it…
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Drug Screening Target Designed for All Ebola Types
8 October 2014. Researchers at University of Utah and Navigen Inc., both in Salt Lake City, designed a synthetic peptide acting like a protein found in all strains of the Ebola virus that can serve as a target when screening for potential drugs to treat patients with the deadly disease. The team led by Utah…
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Genes Identified to Boost Vitamin A in Corn
6 October 2014. Agricultural researchers at Purdue University identified a few key genes that can increase ingredients in corn for building vitamin A in humans. And because these genes are already found in some corn varieties, say the authors, new types of corn can be developed without transferring genes from other species. The team led…
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Google Glass Captioning Developed for Hearing Impaired
3 October 2014. Computer scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta designed a system that converts speech from conversation partners to text, displayed on Google Glass systems worn by people with hearing difficulties. Google Glass is a wearable miniature computer that displays data on eyeglasses worn by the user. The software is a creation…