Mercury Bio LLC has developed a patent-pending technology that will enable highly targeted delivery of both RNA therapeutics and small-molecule drugs to targeted diseased cells.

Diwali, the Festival of Light, marks different events depending on where it is celebrated. In some areas of India, it marks the return of Lord Rama to his birthplace of Ayodhya after defeating the demon Ravana. For Vivek Subbiah, associate professor at the Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics, Division of Cancer Medicine of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the story of how Rama defeated Ravana has parallels in drug discovery. Ravana had 10 heads, and when one was cut off, it grew back. Rama defeated Ravana by means of a magic arrow that entered through the demon’s navel.

Turn Biotechnologies Inc. has presented interim preclinical data that demonstrates treating T cells with its proprietary technologies can significantly increase their ability to kill cancer.

Researchers based at the City University of New York (CUNY) have designed a deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) model that can improve preclinical predictions of drug responses in humans. As outlined in the Oct. 17, 2022, online issue of Nature Machine Intelligence, the researchers believe their model – a context-aware deconfounding autoencoder (CODE-AE) – can help improve the quality of early drug response prediction and help reduce subsequent clinical trial failures.

Anti-SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibody (MAb) pair COV2-2196 (tixagevimab, class I) and COV2-2130 (cilgavimab, class III) are human neutralizing Abs (nAbs) that target nonredundant, complementary epitopes within the receptor binding domain of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (S-RBD).

Investigators from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark have developed a cell line engineered to express bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP-2) and key extracellular matrix genes and critical factors that regulate and support human hematopoiesis. The findings were reported in the Oct. 12, 2022, issue of Science Translational Medicine. One of the clinical applications that the research team is interested in involves exploiting the MSOD-B hOss as a tumor model for bone colonization in the context of various cancers.

It is largely known that oral drug delivery for macromolecules is often limited by the degradative environment of the gastrointestinal tract. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and their collaborators have presented Robocap, an oral mucus-clearing drug-delivery capsule that enhances the gastrointestinal absorption of drugs.