A company developing a means to edit RNA has raised more than $30 million in a venture capital funding round. Seattle-based Shape Therapeutics, or ShapeTx, said Tuesday that it had raised a $35.5 million Series A financing, led by New Enterprise Associates and with participation from CureDuchenne Ventures. The company said it plans to use the money to build up its intellectual…
The National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute funded a unique collaborative — The Sickle Cell Clinical and Economic Impact Consortium — that brings together The Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics Institute at the University of Washington School of Pharmacy, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the NHLBI, and The Emmes Company. The collaborative enables the two…
Researchers looking to unlock the mysteries of Alzheimer’s disease have revealed new insights from old variants. A gene called apolipoprotein E (APOE), long implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, has two variants that act differently among Caribbean Hispanics depending on the ancestral origin, according to a study published in Alzheimer’s and Dementia. In this study, individuals with African-derived ancestry in their APOE gene…
Presence of a modified protein identifies tumors that seem unharmful but actually are dangerous and require intensive care. A modified protein in benign-appearing meningiomas can reveal which are truly benign and which are more dangerous and require more aggressive treatment, researchers have discovered. The finding may also offer clues as to why these ‘benign’ tumors, which arise from the membranes that…
An infectious cancer that originated in one species of mussel growing in the Northern Hemisphere has spread to related mussels in South America and Europe, says a new study published today in eLife. The findings also suggest that humans may unwittingly be contributing to the worldwide spread of infectious cancers that can affect mussels and other bivalves such as clams and…
The MaveDB database is a repository for data from experiments – called multiplex assays of variant effect (MAVEs) – that systematically measure the impact of thousands of individual sequence variants on a gene’s function. These experiments can provide valuable information about how proteins produced by that gene function, how variants in that gene may contribute to disease, and how to engineer synthetic…
A cluster of antibiotic-resistant bacteria called Campylobacter coli has been found in men who have sex with men (MSM) in Seattle and Montreal, researchers report in a new study. A cluster is a group of strains that are very closely genetically related. One of the bacterial strains appears to have acquired a new gene that made it able to resist…
Genes from a virus that was stitched into the human genome thousands of years ago are active, producing proteins in the human brain and other tissues, according to researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine and the Laval University School of Medicine in Quebec, Canada. Their finding might help explain why people who inherit this “fossil virus” appear…
The path from student to researcher is not set in stone; most take the more traditional route where they choose a field during their undergraduate years and keep with it through master’s and Ph.D. degrees. Then, there are others who happen upon the field and, unsuspectingly, fall in love with it. Jennifer Stone, a research professor at the UW, falls…
Scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle have developed a new strategy to counter the frustrating ability of HIV to sidestep vaccines designed to block it. It is a scheme that relies on one of the oldest tricks in the book for a fisherman: Use the right bait. “The kind of vaccine strategy that we are talking about…