Autolus Ltd, an oncology spin-out from University College (UCL) London, has raised £30 million in a Series A financing from Syncona LLP in order to develop a new generation of engineered T cell therapies. The funding, which is significant for a start-up, reflects the expectations of the founders that the new T cell technology will revolutionise the treatment of cancer. Besides Syncona, the other founder is UCL Business Plc, the technology transfer arm of UCL.
Research supported by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has described how mutations in a group of genes of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum work in concert to enable the parasite to resist artemisinin, the standard treatment for the disease. The findings were reported in Nature Genetics on 19 January 2015.
Eight projects aimed at tackling the health crisis in west Africa caused by the spread of the Ebola virus have been jointly announced by the Innovative Medicines Initiative and the European industry federation, Efpia, in Brussels.
Researchers at the Technische Universität München have reported a previously unknown regulator of programmed cell death, an important mechanism for ridding the human body of cancer. The finding was reported in Nature Medicine in late 2014.
Researchers in the US have discovered a new antibiotic which appears to be effective against certain bacteria without incurring resistance from the same pathogens. The discovery, by a team from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, was reported on 7 January 2015 in the journal Nature.
A gene has been identified in the tissue of breast cancer patients which, when over-expressed, appears to drive the development of triple-negative breast cancer, one of the more aggressive cancers. The finding was reported on 9 January 2015 in Nature Communications by a team of scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and nine other academic centres.
Innovation in the biopharmaceutical industry is increasingly being driven by partnership deals. The variety and structure of these deals were discussed in early December 2014 in Lille, France at BioFIT, an event organised by the French life science group AFSSI. Industry executives and technology transfer officers argued that partnerships are becoming more common, and in some cases, more open-ended.
Novartis and the University of Pennsylvania have issued a clinical update of their cell therapy for paediatric patients with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) showing that 36 out of 39 patients, or 92% of trial participants, experienced a complete remission of their disease.
Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK have sequenced the genome of a very rare tapeworm that went undetected for four years in a UK patient’s brain.
Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that is an important cause of skin and soft tissue infections, may undermine the skin’s immune defenses and actually aggravate a skin condition known as neurodermatitis, according to findings by Technische Universität Mϋnchen and the University of Tϋbingen.