Feature Channels: Biotech

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According to the CDC, about 20 percent of Americans with HIV don’t know it, greatly increasing their risk of transmitting the virus.

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The drug Incivek, when given in combination with two other medications, can dramatically increase the chances of people chronically infected with untreated genotype 1 hepatitis C virus achieving a viral cure.

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Veritract, a University of Utah startup company, is developing a “Smart Feeding Tube” with a live camera and steering mechanism that enables doctors to place feeding tubes with much more accuracy than current technology allows. The company has just received $820,000 in an early round of funding.

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Mayo Clinic investigators and collaborators from the United Kingdom cured well-established prostate tumors in mice using a human vaccine with no apparent side effects. This novel cancer treatment approach encourages the immune system to rid itself of prostate tumors without assistance from toxic chemotherapies and radiation treatments. Such a treatment model could some day help people to live tumor free with fewer side effects than those experienced from current therapies.

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Biogen Idec is working with the NC State Poole College of Management's Executive Programs to develop the organization's future leaders in its pharmaceutical operations and technology business unit.

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Now a new study reports that reovirus has the potential to treat certain lung cancer patients, when the reovirus is combined with two other substances known as paclitaxel and carboplatin.

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It has been an exciting time for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute student Kinsley French. During the Rensselaer commencement, French was awarded the J. Erik Jonsson Prize for her perfect 4.0 grade point average and high-caliber undergraduate research. She earned a dual major in mathematics and biology in just three and a half years.

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A mutant gene long thought to accelerate tumor growth in thyroid cancer patients actually inhibits the spread of malignant cells, showing promise for novel cancer therapies, a Mayo Clinic study has found.

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For cooperation to persist in the often violently competitive realm of bacteria, cheaters must be kept in line. Two Indiana University Bloomington biologists have learned that in one bacterium, at least, bacterial cooperators can evolve to "police" the cheaters and arrest their bids for dominance.

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Seattle BioMed’s Aderem shares Insight into rational vaccine development using new approaches.

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A group led by University of Wisconsin-Madison stem cell researcher Su-Chun Zhang reports it has been able to direct embryonic and induced human stem cells to become astrocytes in the lab dish.

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The Center for Biotechnology (CFB) at Stony Brook University has established the Biotechnology Commercialization Fund to accelerate the development of promising biomedical technologies emerging from Stony Brook University. Created with support from the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology, and Innovation (NYSTAR) and the Office of the Vice President for Research at Stony Brook University, the Fund will immediately help develop six technologies in partnership with researchers University-wide.

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A discovery reported from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that micrometer-sized droplets of liquid crystal, which have been found to change their ordering and optical appearance in response to the presence of very low concentrations of a particular bacterial lipid, might find new uses in a range of biological contexts.

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Grantees honored as finest in field of biotechnology.

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Scientists at the Sahlgrenska Academy have discovered an explanation of how stroke patients can achieve better recovery. A hormone that is associated with the growth hormone system has proved to benefit recovery during the later phases of rehabilitation after a stroke.

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A uniquely collaborative study by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies uncovered a novel mechanism that turns up glucose production in the liver when blood sugar levels drop, pointing towards a new class of drugs for the treatment of metabolic disease.

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Boston University researchers discover that a simple compound — sugar – dramatically boosts the effectiveness of first-line antibiotics. Their findings appear in the May 12 issue of Nature.

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A common, tiny tropical fish plays a key role in a new model for Cushing disease, giving researchers a powerful tool to conduct extensive searches for effective treatments for this serious hormonal disorder, testing up to 300 drugs weekly.

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An international team of researchers led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has deciphered the genome of a tropical marine organism known to produce substances potentially useful against human diseases.

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UCLA scientists have discovered a way to wake up the immune system to fight cancer by delivering an immune system-stimulating protein in a nanoscale container called a vault directly into lung cancer tumors, harnessing the body’s natural defenses to fight disease growth.

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Only about half of new drugs approved in the last decade had comparative effectiveness data available at the time of their approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and approximately two-thirds of new drugs had this information available when alternative treatment options existed, according to a study in the May 4 issue of JAMA.

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Results from the first year of a two-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinical trial show that Avastin®, a drug approved to treat some cancers and is commonly used off-label to treat age-related macular degeneration (AMD), is as effective as the more expensive FDA-approved drug Lucentis® for treating AMD.

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Medical therapies may be developed to recover healthy proteins that are important to prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes.

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A class of drugs that shows promise in breast and ovarian cancers with BRCA gene mutations could potentially benefit colorectal cancer patients with a different genetic mutation, a new study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center finds.

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An over-the-counter drug used to treat diarrhea combined with minocycline, an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections, could one day change the lives of those living with cystic fibrosis.

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Transplanting cells from healthy adult livers may work in treating a genetic liver-lung disorder that affects millions of people worldwide, according to an animal study in the April 18 online edition of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Jayanta Roy-Chowdhury, M.D., professor of medicine and of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, is the study’s senior author.

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A discovery by Johns Hopkins scientists about how a single-celled fungus survives in low-oxygen settings may someday help humans whose immune systems are compromised by organ transplants or AIDS.

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U-M doctors stress a balanced approach, but note older therapies can offset risks, costs of ‘biologics’.

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Many of the newest weapons in the war on cancer come in the form of personalized therapies that can target specific changes in an individual’s tumor. By disrupting molecular processes in tumor cells, these drugs can keep the tumor from growing and spreading. At the forefront of this work are Binghamton University researchers, Susan Bane, and Susannah Gal, who are deploying a new tool in their study of an enzyme called tubulin tyrosine ligase, or TTL.

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A natural hormone known to inhibit aging can also protect kidneys against renal fibrosis, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have demonstrated.

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On Wednesday, May 4, as part of Perimeter Institute’s Public Lecture Series presented by Sun Life Financial, Dr. Leroy Hood, a pioneer in systems approaches to biology and medicine, will discuss emerging technologies that may transform medical research over the next decade.

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The HIV Vaccine Trials Network plans to clinically test a novel vaccine product developed by GeoVax scientists that expresses human granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) in combination with inactivated HIV proteins.

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The meaning of the standard fecal coliform test used to monitor water quality has been called into question by a new study that identified sources of Escherichia coli bacteria that might not indicate an environmental hazard.

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A new study has demonstrated no significant benefit of taking the drug bosentan for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).

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For the first time in millions of years, king crabs are invading Antarctica which could mean organisms with disease-fighting compounds may be wiped out.

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A phase 2 clinical trial for the treatment of a severe form of age-related macular degeneration called geographic atrophy (GA) has become the first study to show the benefit of a therapy to slow the progression of vision loss for this disease. The results highlight the benefit of the use of a neurotrophic factor to treat GA and provide hope to nearly one million Americans suffering from GA.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Marc-Olivier Coppens has developed a new technique for boosting the stability of enzymes, making them useful under a much broader range of conditions. Coppens confined lysozyme and other enzymes inside carefully engineered nanoscale holes, or nanopores. Instead of denaturing, these embedded enzymes mostly retained their 3-D structure and exhibited a significant increase in activity.

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A team of scientists from Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Granada in Spain have successfully reconstructed active enzymes from four-billion-year-old extinct organisms. By measuring the properties of these enzymes, they could examine the conditions in which the extinct organisms lived. The results shed new light on how life has adapted to changes in the environment from ancient to modern Earth.

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Scientists from the Morgridge Institute for Research, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of California and the WiCell Research Institute moved gene therapy one step closer to clinical reality by determining that the process of correcting a genetic defect does not substantially increase the number of potentially cancer-causing mutations in induced pluripotent stem cells.

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Johns Hopkins scientists and their colleagues paired laboratory and epidemiologic data to find that men using the cardiac drug, digoxin, had a 24 percent lower risk for prostate cancer. The scientists say further research about the discovery may lead to use of the drug, or new ones that work the same way, to treat the cancer.

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A section of the AIDS virus's protein envelope once considered an improbable target for a vaccine now appears to be one of the most promising, new research by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists indicates.

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Biologists at UC San Diego have identified the molecular mechanisms triggered by starvation in fruit flies that enhance the nervous system’s response to smell, allowing these insects and presumably vertebrates—including humans—to become more efficient and voracious foragers when hungry. Their discovery of the neural changes that control odor-driven food searches in flies, which they detail in a paper in the April 1 issue of the journal Cell, could provide a new way to potentially regulate human appetite.

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Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have shown that it is possible to immunize mammals to control fertility. They say their technique could possibly be used on other mammals -- including humans -- because fertility hormones and their receptors are species-non-specific and are similar in both females and males. For pets, the technique could be an alternative to castration and adverse effects of hormone administration.

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Giving girls with Turner syndrome low doses of estrogen, as well as growth hormone, years before the onset of puberty, increases their height and offers a wealth of other benefits, say a team of researchers led by Thomas Jefferson University. Their report is published in the March 31st issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

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Basic Yellow 1, a dye used in neuroscience labs around the world, is a wonder drug for nematode worms. Thioflavin T extended lifespan in healthy worms by more than 50 percent and slowed the disease process in worms bred to mimic aspects of Alzheimer’s. The research could open new ways to intervene in aging and age-related disease.

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Two biomedical engineering students from Ryerson University invent prosthetic arm that is controlled by brain signals and powered by pneumatics.

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Unlike other drugs that target cancer cells from the outside with minimal effect, this “transport vehicle” carries multiple drugs that spare healthy cells, accumulate in tumor cells and strike cancer-specific molecular targets inside.

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A new study showed that the drug AT-406 effectively targets proteins that block normal cell death from occurring. Blocking these proteins caused tumor cells to die, while not harming normal cells. The researchers believe the drug has potential to treat multiple types of cancer.

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A drug approved to treat certain types of cancer has shown promising results in the treatment of patients with scleroderma, according to results from an open-label Phase II trial.

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University of Utah scientists used infrared light to make heart cells contract and inner-ear cells signal the brain. The discovery might improve cochlear implants for deafness and lead to devices to restore vision, maintain balance and treat movement disorders.