Led by Rick Klausner and Gregory Verdine, LifeMine has found drug candidates with novel mechanisms using its data science platform for mining fungal genomes. The company now has an additional $50 million to move its first programs toward...

DISEASE CATEGORY: Renal INDICATION: Renal damage Promoting the activity of the transcription factor PXR could treat acute kidney injury (AKI). PXR protein levels in renal tubular cells were lower in kidney biopsies from 20 AKI...

A spread-deficient cytomegalovirus carrying SIV antigens evoked long-term protective immunity against successive SIV infections in monkeys, suggesting that a prophylactic HIV vaccine can be developed in humans using a similar strategy. While academics and companies...

Drug developers are creating a new class of compounds that disrupt a protein-protein interaction in the Hippo pathway that goes awry in cancers and fibrotic diseases. At least two programs are poised to enter the...

INDICATION: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) Fruit fly studies suggest promoting BMPRI or BMP7 expression could help treat ALS. In a Drosophila model of ALS expressing mutant SOD1, overexpression of the Drosophila ortholog of human BMPRI...

In licensing a suite of newly discovered gene editing tools, Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. is broadening its options for solving problems that its core small molecule technology can’t address. On Jan. 3, Vertex announced a deal...

A team at Illumina Inc. (NASDAQ:ILMN) has developed an AI algorithm that will help identify pathogenic mutations from genome sequencing analyses by including non-human primate data in the training data set, and the approach could...

Escient Pharmaceuticals Inc. (San Diego, Calif.) raised $40 million in a series A round led by The Column Group. Also participating were 5AM Ventures and Osage University Partners. Escient is developing compounds targeting GPCRs, including...

Escient Pharmaceuticals Inc. (San Diego, Calif.) raised $40 million in a series A round led by The Column Group. Also participating were 5AM Ventures and Osage University Partners. Escient is developing compounds targeting GPCRs, including...

Following the splash that CRISPR has made in the world of therapeutics, academics are expanding the tool kit of Cas enzymes and finding new uses in diagnostics. Early hints suggest the technology could become competitive,...