To Steve Hyman, the manual that clinicians currently use to diagnose mental disorders is an active obstacle to getting a scientific understanding of those disorders. Hyman, who is director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, MIT and Harvard, and a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), listed multiple weaknesses of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), whose diagnoses, he said, are “arbitrary, rigid, life-stage and context-insensitive,” as well as blind to the fact that mental disorders exist along a continuum.
Senisca Ltd., a spinout from the University of Exeter, has raised an additional £3.7 million (US$4.7 million) in funding to support the development of RNA-based senotherapeutics to treat age-related disease.
Merck & Co. Inc. has announced plans to initiate clinical development of a new investigational multi-valent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine designed to provide broader protection against multiple HPV types.
Several presentations at the 31st Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2024) held in Denver from March 3 to 6, 2024, focused on childhood HIV and highlighted the lack of pediatric data. The epicenter of this pandemic in the youngest is in the southern region of the African continent. However, there are few studies for children with HIV, mostly for the northern hemisphere.
Work at Bellbrook Labs LLC has led to the identification of cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (MB21D1; cGAS) inhibitors reported to be useful for the treatment of autoimmune diseases.
The research on novel vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 with improved characteristics continues. These ideal features include rapid development to target variants of concern, easy manufacturing, and an excellent safety profile while inducing humoral and cellular immune responses.
Creative Medical Technology Holdings Inc.'s Immcelz (CELZ-101) has been awarded orphan drug designation by the FDA. Immcelz is aimed at preventing allograft rejection in patients undergoing pancreatic islet cell transplantation.
Neuraminidase (NA) is an essential surface protein of influenza viruses with potential as an effective drug and vaccine target. However, knowledge of the NA antigenic landscape remains limited, and most current influenza vaccines induce antibodies against the surface glycoprotein hemagglutinin.