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Immunotherapy Start-Up Gains $102M in Venture Funds
20 October 2015. A new enterprise founded by researchers in the U.S. and Europe that aims to provide personalized cancer therapies harnessing the immune system raised $102 million in its first round of venture financing. The company Gritstone Oncology — in San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts — says it plans to focus initially on developing…
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Evotec, Foundation Partner on Rare Juvenile Disease
20 October 2015. The drug discovery company Evotec AG and Beyond Batten Disease Foundation are collaborating on discovery of new drugs to treat juvenile Batten disease, a rare inherited neurodegenerative disorder. Financial details of the partnership were not revealed. Batten disease is a rare genetic condition of the nervous system that in most cases begins…
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Novartis Licensing Depression Therapy Technology
19 October 2015. Luc Therapeutics, a biotechnology company designing treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders, is licensing part of its technology to the pharmaceutical company Novartis to develop treatments for depression. Dollar amounts paid under the agreement to Luc Therapeutics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were not disclosed. Depression is a widespread condition, which when it becomes…
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Help Us Do Science
Updated 21 November 2015. The survey is now closed. Thank you for taking part. 19 October 2015. We’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of Science and Enterprise readers. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve Science and Enterprise and contributing to the science of blog readership. For completing the survey, each participant…
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On the Road Again
15 October 2015. Science & Enterprise will be traveling today and Friday, so there will be no posts on either of those days. We will resume our regular posting on Monday, 19 October. * * *
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Cancer Institute Spins-Off Company, Gains Licensing Deal
14 October 2015. Ontario Institute for Cancer Research is spinning off a new enterprise to discover therapies for blood-related cancers, and will partner with Janssen Biotech Inc. to take those therapies to market. The licensing deal between Novera Therapeutics Inc., the OICR spin-off company in Toronto, and Janssen Biotech, a division of Johnson & Johnson,…
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Universal Wireless Charging Device Designed
14 October 2015. Engineering researchers designed a prototype device that can simultaneously charge mobile phones compatible with leading wireless charging specifications. Dukju Ahn and Patrick Mercier at University of California in San Diego describe their device in a recent issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics (paid subscription required). Wireless charging of mobile devices…
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Institute, GlaxoSmithKline ID Tuberculosis Candidates
13 October 2015. A biomedical research institute partnered with a lab backed by pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline to identify candidates for drugs that act on bacteria causing tuberculosis. The team from Center for Infectious Disease Research in Seattle and Tres Cantos Open Lab Foundation, a lab in Spain sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, published its findings in a…
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Spin-Off to Provide Lower-Cost Molecular Imaging Technology
13 October 2015. A new enterprise based on research at Harvard University is offering a technology that allows ordinary microscopes to display high resolution images of single molecules. The company, Ultivue Inc., is founded by and licensing technologies from the lab of Peng Yin at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Yin and colleagues…
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Study Shows Blood Test Finds Early Pancreatic Cancer
12 October 2015. An evaluation of a blood test to find early stages of pancreatic cancer showed the test successfully identified early-stage cancer in the vast majority of study participants with the disease. The findings published by a team from diagnostics company VolitionRx in Belgium and Lund University in Sweden appeared last week in the…