Genomics England has taken the next step towards sequencing the genomes of a large number of patients in the National Health Service (NHS) with the appointment of industry partners to help it explore the potential of liquid biopsy tests to manage cancer.
Three European-born scientists have been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of cryo-electron microscopy, which is a technique for simplifying and improving the images of biomolecules. The award was announced on 4 October.
Novartis has announced a new academic alliance to explore the proteome as a source of new drug leads for cancer and other serious diseases. The collaboration is with the University of California Berkeley, US.
An experiment in which CRISPR-Cas9 was used to repair a gene mutation in a human embryo appears to have solved two safety problems associated with this technology while raising ethical questions about its long-term application.
A UK medical charity has decided that royalty income from intellectual property that it licensed to the developers of Keytruda, should be reinvested in innovation. The charity, LifeArc, has therefore set up two new funds to support academic research and early-stage biotech companies.
Scientists at Imperial College London have determined that pneumococcal bacteria have been able to thwart vaccines because a “hotspot” of rapidly evolving
The term biopsy has traditionally been associated with the examination of tissue from a patient in order to detect the presence of disease. Tissue samples can be taken from the bone marrow, or organs such as the bladder, lung or liver, using procedures of varying complexity from the insertion of a needle into the skin, to surgery.
For the first time, scientists at BioNTech AG have shown that it is possible to instruct an organism to create its own bispecific antibodies capable targeting and killing cancer. The experiment, conducted in mice, was reported in Nature Medicine on 12 June.
Heptares Therapeutics has described the structure of the glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor binding to a peptide agonist, giving the first visual evidence of how a class of drugs that treat Type 2 diabetes actually work. The findings were reported online in Nature on 31 May 2017.
A novel vaccine platform developed by Hookipa Biotech AG has triggered an immune response in genetically engineered mice with cancer that was stronger than many conventional viral vectors. The findings were published on 26 May 2017 in Nature Communications.