Loqus23 Therapeutics Ltd. has raised £35 million (US$46.6 million) in a series A to take forward small molecules it has discovered for the treatment of Huntington’s disease and other conditions that are driven by DNA mismatch repair (MMR). MMR fixes DNA insertions, deletions and misincorporation errors that occur during transcription and/or cellular replication. Smaller repairs are directed by MutSalpha, a protein that binds single base mismatches, while MutSbeta handles larger insertion/deletion loops. Huntington’s and other triplet repeat diseases are caused when trinucleotide repeats accumulate in somatic DNA to the extent that they interfere with protein expression.

Setpoint Medical Inc. received U.S. FDA investigational device exemption approval to initiate a study of its neuroimmune modulation platform in people living with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. Setpoint plans to launch the 60-person trial in 2025 to evaluate the use of its implantable neurostimulation device to slow or reverse the nerve damage characteristic of multiple sclerosis.

A collaboration led by the Flywire Consortium and comprising hundreds of scientists has completed a whole map of the adult fruit fly brain after several decades of collaborative work. By using electron microscopy and three-dimensional reconstruction supported by AI tools, the researchers have revealed the neural wiring of the Drosophila melanogaster brain, a connectome of 140,000 neurons with 50 million synaptic connections. In the future, researchers could possibly use this map as an artificial in silico model to study the brain as a simulator through its connections, though a lot of work remains to be done for this.

Loqus23 Therapeutics Ltd. has closed a £35 million (US$43 million) series A financing, with the aim of supporting its work developing small-molecule somatic expansion inhibitors for the treatment of Huntington’s disease and other triplet repeat disorders.