A collaborative research project between scientists at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Karus Therapeutics Ltd, a venture capital-backed company in the UK, has yielded a candidate drug inhibiting P13K, a target of growing interest to the pharmaceutical industry.
Yoshinori Ohsumi, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in discovering and elucidating the mechanisms underlying autophagy, a process by which the cell can degrade and recycle its own contents.
Using a combination of human neural stem cells and 3K3A-APC, a recombinant variant of human activated protein C, researchers have been able to dramatically increase the production of nerve cells in mice with stroke-induced brain damage. The findings were reported on 22 August 2016 in Nature Medicine.
Research involving mice has suggested for the first time that niches of neural progenitor cells in the adult brain may be vulnerable to infection from the Zika virus. The findings were reported in the 18 August issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell.
Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have discovered that astrocytes, a sub-type of glia cells in the central nervous system, play an important role in the supply of sugar to the brain. The findings were reported in the 11 August 2016 edition of Cell.
Cambridge Innovation Capital Plc (CIC), which finances projects arising from the University of Cambridge as well as from area biotechs, has raised £75 million in new equity capital from existing and new institutional investors including Woodford Investment Management.
Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in collaboration with the Estonian Competence Centre on Health Technologies have developed a new gene expression analysis assay that will enable a wider use of blood samples in biomarker discovery and analysis.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a lethal motor neurone disease that progressively paralyses patients, has many different genetic causes, according to studies coordinated by the University Medical Center of Utrecht, which has reported the discovery of two new ALS genes.
German scientists have clarified the way in which cancer cells spread from a primary tumour to distant parts of the body in a process called metastasis. It has been known for some time that cancer cells travel through the bloodstream to reach other locations, but how they escape from blood vessels has not been clear.
The Wellcome Trust, one of the largest sources of private medical investment in Europe, has appointed Jim Smith as its director of science, a role that puts him in charge of scientific investigations and oversight of the Trust’s scientific investment portfolio.