UW Medicine’s Dr. Colin Pritchard, a leader in molecular diagnostics for cancer, has received the Catalyst for Precision Medicine Award from Scientific American. The honor includes a $50,000 donation, which Pritchard has directed to UW Medicine for students focused on cancer diagnostics. Pritchard is a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine in…
Seal Rock Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing a platform of first-in-class and best-in-class therapeutic kinase inhibitors for treatment of severe fibrotic and inflammatory diseases with limited or no available therapies, today announced completion of the single ascending dose (SAD) portion of its Phase 1 clinical trial of SRT-015, a next-generation, liver-selective inhibitor of Apoptosis Signal-regulating Kinase 1 (ASK1) for…
The authors pin down a major biological mechanism through which opioids act to potentiate motivated behaviors. While most people are familiar with exogenous opioid drugs like morphine or fentanyl, it turns out that we also have an endogenous opioid system. While neuroscience research has identified the nucleus accumbens as an important mediator of opioids on reward behaviors, until now they did not have the required technology to address the deeper biological questions.
Recently, “prime editing”, a new method that builds on CRISPR, improved the precision of genome editing significantly, but remains inefficient for introducing insertion or deletion mutations greater than 100 base pairs in size. The authors developed a new method named PRIME-Del, based on prime editing, that enables the precise deletion of larger genomic regions. In their paper, they demonstrate that PRIME-Del could delete up to 10,000 base pairs with substantial improvement in precision compared to CRISPR-based methods, and allow insertion of arbitrary sequences at the deletion junction.
Seattle-based cell therapy startup Immusoft will collaborate with pharma giant Takeda to develop treatments targeted to the central nervous system in a deal worth potentially more than $900 million. Immusoft’s technology involves engineering a patient’s B cells to mass produce therapeutic proteins. These immune cells are good at pumping out large amounts of proteins, such as an enzyme missing in…
Molecular Analysis Facility staff member Dan Graham was recently selected to receive the 2021 AVS Applied Surface Science Division Peter M. A. Sherwood Mid-Career Professional Award for innovation and leadership in the application of Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) to organic and biological materials and for the development of practical multivariate analysis tools, which are widely used in the applied…
Faraday Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to improving the quality of life for patients experiencing potentially life-changing critical illness by focusing on muscle health, today announced the enrollment of its first patient in a Phase 2 study of FDY-5301 (“Iocyte ICU”). FDY-5301 is an elemental reducing agent being developed by the company for the prevention and treatment of ICU-acquired…
Researchers may have uncovered answers on how to create a safer opioid: Design it to bypass the part of brain that feels pleasure, but retain the analgesic properties, which make opioids one of the most effective pain relievers. In a study published in Nature Oct. 13, researchers looked at how opioids may have become so widely abused. “We identified a major source of…
If asked to picture a neuron, most of us probably think of a star-shaped cell with an arm that’s only slightly longer than its body — like the standard textbook drawing. We think of it sitting in the brain and using this little arm along with the points of its star-shaped tendrils, technically known as an axon and dendrites, to…
Seattle-based cell therapy startup Immusoft will collaborate with pharma giant Takeda to develop treatments targeted to the central nervous system in a deal worth potentially more than $900 million. Immusoft’s technology involves engineering a patient’s B cells to mass produce therapeutic proteins. These immune cells are good at pumping out large amounts of proteins, such as an enzyme missing in a particular…
