NEWS

There are 37 trillion or so cells in our bodies that work together to give us life. But it may surprise you that we still haven’t put a good number on how many distinct cell types there are within those trillions of cells. That’s why in 2016 a team of researchers from around the globe … Read more

Today, Pfizer Inc. and Beam Therapeutics Inc., a biotechnology company developing precision genetic medicines through base editing, announced an exclusive four-year research collaboration focused on in vivo base editing programs for three targets for rare genetic diseases of the liver, muscle and central nervous system. Investors should note Pfizer will pay Beam $300 million up … Read more

Arc Institute is a nonprofit research organization headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Arc is an independent institute that operates in collaboration with Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco. According to Arc, biomedical innovation in areas such as mRNA technology, gene editing, and cell therapies suggest that historic … Read more

Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that helps your immune system fight cancer. The immune system helps your body fight infections and other diseases. It is made up of white blood cells and organs and tissues of the lymph system. Cancer immunotherapy is sometimes referred to as immuno-oncology. Immunotherapy is a type of biological therapy. … Read more

What is life? For much of the 20th century, this question did not particularly concern biologists. Life is a term for poets, not scientists, argued the synthetic biologist Andrew Ellington in 2008, who began his career studying how life began. Despite Ellington’s reservations, the related fields of origins-of-life research and astrobiology have renewed focus on … Read more

The number of STEM jobs — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — is in a secular growth storm, having sped past the number of non-STEM jobs by three times since 2000. Students pursuing STEM education will be positioned to benefit from the wave of innovations in synthetic biology. And experts say there might not be enough graduates in those fields to fill … Read more

Today, access to the world’s largest browsable resource linking rare protein-coding genetic variants to human health and disease was launched through a genetic exome sequence analysis collaboration between AbbVie, Biogen Inc. and Pfizer. Managed by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the browser gives access to results from analyses of whole exome sequencing data … Read more

In April, three leading synthetic biology companies announced the launch of the Synthetic Biology (SynBio) Coalition (www.synbioco.com) to promote investment and support for the American synthetic biology industry. Synthetic biology is a field of science that involves redesigning microorganisms for useful purposes.  It is already being leveraged across many industries, including pharmaceuticals and medical treatments, … Read more

In June, GRAIL, Inc., presented the first results from the interventional PATHFINDER study evaluating Galleri™, a multi-cancer early detection (MCED) blood test. The results, presented at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting, support Galleri’s performance in clinical settings. The company also announced today that Galleri is now available in the U.S. by prescription only.  “The interim … Read more

A change of instructions in a computer program directs the computer to execute a different command. Similarly, synthetic biologists are learning the rules for how to direct the activities of human cells.  “Cells are intricate machines that have evolved many interacting circuits—sets of genes that coordinate functions like migration, metabolism, and cell division,” explains David … Read more