The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has awarded a grant to a San Diego, California-based company to progress new technology for fighting S. aureus by disrupting a signalling process called quorum sensing.
Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in the US have reported the successful construction of a self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cell, technology that could have future application to pharmaceuticals.
The US National Institutes of Health have awarded $3.4 million to GlycoVaxyn AG of Switzerland and a researcher at the Harvard Medical School to carry out preclinical work on a new S. aureus vaccine for hospital-acquired infections.
Two US centres of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Germany, together with Boston University and the biopharmaceutical company iBio, Inc, have launched a factory that uses non-genetically modified green plants to produce vaccines.
Scientists in the UK have identified a gene that appears to enable tumour cells to survive radiotherapy. Suppression of the gene could therefore make current radiotherapies more effective, according to the charity, Cancer Research UK.
AstraZeneca Plc has concluded a collaborative research agreement with the University of Pennsylvania in the US to generate new drug candidates for Alzheimer’s disease. Financial details were not disclosed.
Cancer Research Technology (CRT), the technology transfer arm of the charity, Cancer Research UK, has reached an agreement with Cephalon Inc of the US to develop new small molecule drugs targeting members of the protein kinase C family.
Pfizer Inc has reached an agreement with King’s College London to site a small team of its scientists at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Disease at the King’s Guys campus in London to conduct basic research into the biology of pain.
Three large pharmaceutical companies have set up a new not-for-profit company to conduct research into the most commonly-diagnosed cancers in Asia. The initial focus of the research will be on lung and gastric cancers.
Cancer Research Technology (CRT) has entered into a three-year drug discovery and development alliance with AstraZeneca Plc that is expected to lead to the identification of new small molecule drugs targeting changes in a cell’s metabolism.