Evercore ISI analyst Umer Raffat recently called orexin a “red hot neuropsychiatry target,” and the recent Sleep 2024 meeting in Houston bolstered such a view. Also known as hypocretin, the neuropeptide orexin is known to play a crucial role in regulating wakefulness, arousal, and appetite. It’s made in the hypothalamus, and was discovered in the late 1990s. Investigators found that people with narcolepsy can show a deficiency of orexin due to the loss of neurons.
Neuron23 Inc. has synthesized leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2; dardarin) inhibitors reported to be useful for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease.
Evotec SE has announced scientific progress within its neuroscience collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb Co., with a target-based program now advancing into late preclinical development. This milestone triggers a research payment of $20 million to Evotec.
Just as it is for terminally ill cancer patients, time is of the essence for people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, the clinical meaningfulness of Eli Lilly and Co.’s donanemab is the time it gives patients before the disease progresses, Reisa Sperling, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Alzheimer’s Research and Treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told the U.S. FDA’s Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee June 10.
Shionogi & Co. Ltd. has entered into an option agreement with Cilcare Dev SAS to acquire the exclusive license for the global development, manufacturing and commercialization of hearing loss treatment drug candidates CIL-001 and/or CIL-003.
Humanwell Healthcare (Group) Co. Ltd. has described sodium channel protein type 10 subunit α (SCN10A; Nav1.8) blockers reported to be useful for the treatment of pain.
Scientists from the Karolinska Institute have found two different types of cells that give rise to the fibroblasts that form fibrotic scars after spinal cord injury (SCI) depending on their location. In a study in mice, the researchers observed that pericytes acted in lesions that affect the gray matter and perivascular fibroblasts acted in the white matter.
For the U.S. FDA’s Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee, the medical need and the effectiveness of Eli Lilly and Co.’s Alzheimer’s candidate, donanemab, outweighs the safety concerns and lack of data for underrepresented groups and special needs patients. The panel voted unanimously, 11-0, June 10 that the available data show donanemab is effective in treating Alzheimer’s in the population enrolled in Lilly’s clinical trials and that the benefits of the amyloid-targeting monoclonal antibody outweigh the risks in the study population of patients with mild cognitive impairment and mild dementia.
In what represents its first patenting Demon Curonix BV is seeking protection for a system for providing microvesicles to be used in combination with focused ultrasound for drug delivery to the brain.
Genetic variants in core-spliceosome components are tied to a variety of aberrant splicing-driven inherited disorders. CWF19-like protein 2 (CWF19L2) is such a key component located in the spliceosome complex in charge of maturing pre-RNA. No disease-phenotype has been established for CWF19L2.