News Archive

Doctors have just discovered a previously unknown relationship between the long-term recovery of spinal cord injury victims and high blood pressure during their initial surgeries. This may seem like a small bit of medical news—though it will have immediate clinical implications—but what’s important is how it was discovered in the first place.

This wasn’t the result of a new, long-term study, but a meta-analysis of $60 million worth of basic research written off as useless 20 years ago by a team of neuroscientists and statisticians led by the University of California San Francisco and partnering with the software firm Ayasdi, using mathematical and machine learning techniques that hadn’t been invented yet when the trials took place. 

When Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes agreed to be interviewed at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.D Live conference here in Laguna Beach, California, she didn’t know that the event would end up taking place a week after the Journal published an in-depth exposé charging that the company’s blood-testing system had serious problems and that it was actually using commercially available devices for much of its work.

MedImmune, a Greater Washington biotechnology cornerstone, is racing to fill the pipeline for parent AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN) with drug candidates that harness the power of the immune system, even against cancer. And it’s using precision medicine to do it.

A production delay of the FluMist flu vaccine has U.K. pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca scrambling to alleviate shortages at doctors offices this flu season.

Only 5 million doses of the vaccine made by Gaithersburg-based MedImmune, the biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca PLC (NYSE: AZN), has been delivered so far this season. AstraZeneca originally said it planned to distribute 15 million doses.

Free tasty food, brightly coloured bicycles and high salaries are well-known hallmarks of the Googleplex—Google’s famed headquarters in Mountain View, California. But it was not these perks that led cardiologist Jessica Mega to pause her thriving academic career at Harvard Medical School to become the chief medical officer of the company’s life-sciences team. She was lured by the ambitions of the effort, soon to be incorporated under Google’s parent firm Alphabet. Nurtured by Google’s expertise in data analytics and engineering, the biology team is expected to create miniaturized electronic devices and to use these and other means to collect and analyse more health data, more continuously, than is possible today.

UC San Francisco (UCSF) has launched a collaboration with international pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK) to promote early-stage research with the potential to translate into new therapies for cancer, obesity and antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Through the collaboration, researchers from UCSF will work alongside GSK scientists to identify and jointly expedite promising basic research. In a shift from traditional sponsored-research agreements, the program will provide early-stage funding for validating academic discoveries that are not otherwise supported by traditional grant mechanisms.

GlaxoSmithKline and five other major drugmakers have teamed up with the UK government to launch the world’s first venture capital fund dedicated to finding new ways to prevent and treat dementia.

The Department of Health, the charity Alzheimer’s Research UK and the six pharmaceutical firms have raised $100m (£65m) to invest in early-stage, novel treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and other forms of dementia. GSK’s boss, Sir Andrew Witty, has been one of the main driving forces behind the initiative, in which the company is joined by the US drugmakers Johnson & Johnson, Biogen, Eli Lilly and Pfizer, and Japan’s Takeda.

The Seattle-based Microsoft Ventures Accelerator is a four-month program that connects startup founders with mentors and gives them the tools to help grow their business. The accelerator has 24 graduates to date, and is looking for its next class.

Specifically, Microsoft Ventures is looking for companies that focus on machine learning.

Rockville-based health care IT provider DrFirst has secured $25 million in equity financing from Goldman Sachs, elevating its raise in the last year to $42 million.

DrFirst, which specializes in electronic prescription software services, said in a news release it will use the new investment to expand sales and marketing resources. It will also develop resources for new and existing products.

Roche (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY) announced today that it has received FDA approval for the cobas® HBV and cobas® HCV viral load tests, the first assays approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use on the cobas® 6800 and cobas® 8800 Systems. The fully automated systems offer the fastest time to results, the highest throughput and the longest walk-away time available among automated molecular platforms, providing laboratories both improved operating efficiency and flexibility to adapt to changing testing needs. The new tests are the next generation of Roche’s viral load tests, which clinicians use to manage the treatment of patients chronically infected with hepatitis B or hepatitis C virus.