Seattle-based biotech Alpine Immune Sciences (Nasdaq: ALPN) is raising $100 million through an underwritten public offering. With the new funding, announced Tuesday, Alpine co-founder and CEO Mitchell Gold said the biotech now has more than three years of runway. He added that the company, which now has about 130 people, has grown 65% over the past nine months, but he didn’t provide…
Saliva testing is emerging as a potential option to detect oral cavity cancer – a condition often difficult to identify early and which usually becomes a painful ordeal for patients as it progresses. “The way it’s diagnosed is typically with a biopsy, and that biopsy can be painful,” said Dr. Brittany Barber, a head and neck surgeon at UW Medicine. “Other diagnostic techniques…
Two years after scientists showed that an experimental gene therapy for herpes can knock out most latent infection in mice, new tests reveal that it also suppresses the amount of transmissible virus shed by the treated animals. It is encouraging news from researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, where laboratory studies aimed at curing herpes simplex virus infections have continued…
The life sciences sector continues to grow in the Puget Sound region despite a slowdown in venture capital funding in the first half of 2022. Dexter Yard is filling up with the Allen Institute as the latest tenant to lease space in the two-building project at 700 Dexter Ave. N. Earlier this summer Dexter Yard owner BioMed Realty said over…
Suzie Hwang Pun, Washington Research Professor of Bioengineering, has been named the new Director of the Molecular Engineering & Sciences Institute, effective July 1, 2023. The current Director, Pat Stayton, will continue to serve until Suzie’s appointment begins. Pun brings a depth of academic leadership and industry experience and a vision for the future of MolES that will serve the Institute…
The National Cancer Institute awarded the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) a 5-year, $13 million grant to lead a collaborative cancer center and study sequential combinations of targeted inhibitors and immunotherapies. The program – called Spatiotemporal Tumor Analytics for Guiding Sequential Targeted Inhibitor-Immunotherapy Combinations, or ST-Analytics – is designed to determine if the treatments yield greater patient benefit when administered…
Seattle’s Allen Institute will spearhead a project to create an atlas of the cells in the human brain as part of $173 million in new funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health awarded to the institute and its collaborators. The five-year project, announced Thursday, builds on the Allen Institute’s previous endeavors mapping the location, identity and function of cells…
On Aug. 11, LifeCenter Northwest, the Organ Procurement Organization for Washington, and UW Medicine’s heart transplant team together facilitated the Pacific Northwest’s first donation-after-circulatory-death (DCD) heart transplant. The patient, Ryan Stovall, 48, a resident of Beaver Creek, Oregon, is recovering well in Seattle. For decades, only donor hearts from patients who experienced brain death have been transplanted; hearts from patients who…
UW Medicine researchers are recruiting participants for a Phase 3 clinical trial of a drug to treat the monkeypox virus. The drug, tecovirimat, is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat smallpox. Investigators hope this study will establish whether the drug is also safe and effective for treating monkeypox. “There is an urgent need for monkeypox treatments,…
New research from the Cabernard Lab on cell fusion was recently published in Communications Biology(link is external). Authors of the paper include Bharath Sunchu(link is external) and Nicole Lee, former postdoctoral researcher and former lab technician in the Cabernard lab, respectively; Carlos Segura and Jenny Taylor, current UW MCB graduate student and current postdoctoral researcher in the Cabernard lab, respectively; and UW Biology Associate Professor Clemens Cabernard.…