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BALTIMORE, June 11, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Glyscend Therapeutics, a privately held biopharmaceutical company developing novel treatments for type 2 diabetes (T2D) and related metabolic conditions, today announced the closing of a $20.5 million Series A financing round. Healthcare investors Brandon Capital Partners, through its Medical Research Commercialisation Fund (MRCF), and Santé Ventures led the round of funding, which will be used to support the development of the company’s novel oral polymer therapy for patients with T2D and other metabolic diseases. Breakout Labs (a fund in the Thiel Foundation) provided seed funding in 2019.

ROCKVILLE, Md.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Creatv Microtech, a privately-held biotechnology company has pioneered a blood test to predict treatment response in patients with stage II-III NSCLC treated with chemoradiation therapy (CRT) and consolidated immunotherapy. Clinical data presented at the ASCO 2020 virtual annual meeting shows the ability to predict which NSCLC patients will benefit from anti-PD-L1/PD-1 immunotherapies. “We are delighted to present a method to stratify patients responding to immunotherapy by a single tube of blood collected after completion of CRT,” said Dr. Cha-Mei Tang, CEO of Creatv. “Early identification of patients that do not respond to immunotherapy will reduce unnecessary patient suffering from ineffective and costly treatment, allowing patients to proceed to alternative therapies.” Currently, no other blood test can predict immunotherapy treatment response for lung cancer.

Regarding the June 4 front-page article “Cold War echoes in race for vaccine,” about the “race” among nations, notably the United States, China, and Russia and other European nations for development of a vaccine against the novel coronavirus:

When communicating about vaccines and dates, leaders should be careful to note that this means candidate vaccines. We actually have a vaccine only after it is proved effective and safe over a long period, requiring time (years, not months), durability (e.g., the measles vaccine lasts a lifetime whereas some others are much shorter), a formula that covers all or most strains (especially those recurring seasonally) and feasibility (cost, global availability, etc.).

Once upon a time, developing a new vaccine was a step-by-step process that went from concept, to design, to tests in humans, to regulatory approval, to manufacturing.

It was a process that could take a decade or more.

But the urgent need for a COVID-19 vaccine has radically changed all that. Now, the hope is the entire process can be completed in a year or less.

Image: Cell culture operators prepare a 2000-liter single-use bioreactor to produce proteins used to make vaccines. Philip Taciak/Emergent Biosolutions

The National Institutes of Health has launched a $1 million Technology Accelerator Challenge (TAC) to spur the design and development of non-invasive, handheld, digital technologies to detect, diagnose and guide therapies for diseases with high global and public health impact. The Challenge is focused on sickle cell disease, malaria and anemia and is led by NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is cooperating with NIH to help accelerate the transformation of design concepts into products for low-resource settings.

On Monday, June 8, an official at the World Health Organization (WHO) made a surprising statement. People who have Covid-19 but are asymptomatic—meaning they never develop symptoms like fever, coughing, or gastrointestinal distress—very rarely gave it to others, stated Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on the Covid-19 pandemic, at a regularly-scheduled press briefing.

The very next day, the organization took it back. Some might have taken WHO’s original statement to mean that “stealth transmission” of Covid-19 is unlikely—that if a person isn’t actively coughing and sneezing, you don’t need to worry about getting infected. But that’s not necessarily the case. On June 9, WHO clarified that while most transmission seems to come from people showing symptoms, it’s too soon to know exactly how the virus spreads.

Image: AP PHOTO/PETROS KARADJIAS – https://qz.com/

Less than a year after relocating its headquarters to Baltimore, biotech company KaloCyte has raised new funding from Maryland-based investors and expanded its local team.

On Monday, the company announced that it raised $300,000 from the Maryland Momentum Fund, which is a venture fund created by the University System of Maryland that invests in affiliated companies. It is part of a larger funding round for the preclinical-stage company, which is developing an artificial red blood cell substitute. Called ErythroMer, it can be used in situations where stored red blood cells are not available, such as treating trauma when patients have a need for blood.

Image: Baltimore’s BioPark is part of the University System of Maryland. (Courtesy photo)

PathSensors Inc., a Baltimore biotechnology company, announced today the completion of Phase I of a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) entitled “Food Safety in the 21st Century: Rapid Toxin Detection in the Field”. The project’s goal was to engineer and develop a field-deployable instrument for portable pathogen and toxin detection.