Biologically Inspired Engineering, synbio, semi-sythetic biolody, crispr
According to Loncar Funds, biotechnology innovation matters. Whether it is a cure for hepatitis C, new advances in cancer care, or progress against rare and debilitating diseases like cystic fibrosis, patients around the world are benefiting from unprecedented innovation that the biotech industry is delivering. Loncar Funds attributes this innovation to precision medicine. As the … Read more
Two research teams recently reported results from studies involving the long-term evaluation of non-invasive DNA fragments in blood. Evaluating these DNA fragments is called liquid biopsy, and this type of biopsy could vastly improve outcomes through early detection and low false positive rates for a wide variety of cancers. One result is Chinese and the … Read more
Concerto HealthAI, a SymphonyAI Group portfolio company, is innovating in real world data (RWD) and AI solutions for precision oncology. The company’s mission is to bring together unique data assets, AI-based technologies, and top outcomes research and data science talent. Concerto HealthAI’s focus is on revolutionizing clinical and outcomes research to accelerate the insights benefiting … Read more
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) uses real world data (RWD) and real world evidence (RWE) to monitor postmarket safety and adverse events – and also to make regulatory decisions. The 21st Century Cures Act, passed in 2016, places additional focus on the use of these types of data to support regulatory decision making, including … Read more
It all began with an unexpected discovery. CureVac’s founder, Dr. Ingmar Hoerr (a doctoral student at the time), discovered that when it was administered directly into tissue, the historically unstable biomolecule mRNA could be used as a therapeutic vaccine or agent after optimization—no complicated reformulations or molecular packaging needed. With a single discovery, CureVac opened … Read more
Engineering biological systems to solve problems is becoming almost commonplace. Ideas range from finding environmentally sustainable ways to mimic natural resources to building new kinds of medical treatments for deadly diseases. The enormous promise of such work is rapidly intercepting with actual results. When physicist David Ross thinks of these things, he thinks a lot … Read more
Admetsys is developing what can be described as an artificial pancreas for patients requiring precise glucose control in a hospital setting. I spoke with Jeff Valk, CEO, who aptly walked me through his company’s technology and its vital importance for, “The most metabolically variable humans on earth.” To put at-risk patients on a solid ground … Read more
Last month, Adaptive Biotechnologies Corp. (Nasdaq: ADPT) launched ImmuneCODE with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) to begin sharing one of the largest, most detailed views of the immune response to COVID-19 in real time based on de-identified data generated from thousands of COVID-19 blood samples from patients around the globe. The open database contains detailed information … Read more
One can think of the rapid growth of genome sequencing as producing a special kind of exhaust in the form immunologically relevant data that has accumulated in large quantities in databases around the world. Those databases can be mined. Immunoinformatics is emerging as an important tool at the intersection of experimental immunology and various computational … Read more
Ansa Biotechnologies, Inc, a Berkeley, CA-based startup, is developing a technique to control additions of a polymerase that use TdT for de novo DNA synthesis. The ability to synthesize “gene-length” DNA molecules (>500 bases) is invaluable for biological and biomedical research and is a key enabling technology for the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology. … Read more