A new venture capital company with financial backing from the European Investment Fund (EIF) has been launched in Belgium to support start-up and early-stage life science companies in Europe. V-Bio Ventures has raised €63 million in the first closing of its first fund.
Scientists at KU Leuven in Belgium have reported success in treating mice with cystic fibrosis with an experimental gene therapy, though they caution that it will be some time before the treatment is ready for human trials.
A team of scientists, led by investigators at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), have produced a theory as to why some experimental antibody therapies for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have failed to show efficacy in late-stage human trials.
Three scientists who successfully mapped the way in which cells repair damaged DNA and protect genetic information from disintegrating were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They are Tomas Lindahl of the Francis Crick Institute in London, UK; Paul Modrich of Duke University School of Medicine, US and Aziz Sancar of the University of North Carolina, also in the US.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Psysiology or Medicine has been awarded to three scientists who together have developed therapies to treat parasitic diseases that disproportionately affect people in the developing world. The scientists are William Campbell, Satoshi Ōmura, and Youyou Tu.
Researchers at a hospital of the Technical University of Munich in cooperation with Stanford University of the US have developed an epigenetic approach to treating chemotherapy-resistant pancreatic cancer and lung cancer.
Germany-based Immatics Biotechnologies GmbH has launched a subsidiary in the US with the support of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in order to develop adoptive cellular therapies for the treatment of a range of cancers.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute have discovered that aggregations of lymphoid tissue that are found in the small intestine have a role in prion-intermediated diseases.
A potential biomarker has been identified that could help physicians decide whether patients with HER2 + breast cancer will benefit from a combination therapy. According to a report in The Oncologist, patients with PIK3CA mutations are far less likely to respond to combination therapy than others.
Researchers at the University of Heidelberg have discovered that the Ebola virus needs cholesterol to create its cytotoxic effect. Using lipid-lowering agents, including a statin, the researchers were able to reduce the amount of cholesterol in cell cultures in an experiment and suppress the virus’ damage.