A pair of Israeli health tech companies, Beyond Verbal and Healthymize, plan to merge to form Newton, Mass.-based Vocalis Health. The company will be focused on developing vocal biomarkers, which track voice patterns via phone calls or smart devices to screen for various voice-indicating ailments including chronic respiratory and cardiac conditions, as well as depression. Vocalis has raised a $9 million financing led by Israeli health tech and life science venture firm Amoon to accumulate additional clinical data and enhance its voice database.
LONDON – Mologic Ltd. has started recruitment in a 263-patient trial to validate its urine-based home test for anticipating exacerbations of chronic pulmonary obstructive disease (COPD). The lateral flow immunoassay self-test detects five biomarkers of the lung disease in urine that are indicative of inflammation and infection.
BOSTON – For diagnosing nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), liver biopsy is "the reference standard," Dean Hum, president of Genfit Corp., told BioWorld MedTech. "I'm not going to call it the gold standard."
A subtype of schizophrenia is related to abnormally high brain levels of hydrogen sulfide (H2S), which has important implications for the development of new treatments, according to a study by researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan.
There have been three oncology drug approvals by the U.S. FDA over the last few years that were based solely on a genetic biomarker, rather than the location in the body where the tumor originated. But to make that tissue-agnostic approach a reality for oncology patients, detecting those genetic biomarkers will have to become increasingly easy and standardized.
BOSTON – For investors, immuno-oncology (I-O) is still proving "very hard" to buy into, said Christiana Bardon, portfolio manager at Burrage Capital, during a panel session at Biopharm America. "Honestly it was hard from the get-go. If you think about the original ipilimumab data that came from [Medarex Inc.], it was not obvious that [the drug] worked, right? It was like a head fake, actually. Now we're anxiously looking for the next-gen, but the truth is we've been utterly unsuccessful."
LONDON – Monitoring low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) levels in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) fails to identify those who are at the highest risk for heart attack or death, according to a new study that used alternative biomarkers to assess the risk of further events.
