If a woman contracts COVID-19 during her pregnancy, the infection, even if it’s mild, damages the placenta’s immune response to further infections, a UW Medicine-led study has found. The study was published Sept. 17 in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. “This is the largest study to date of placentas from women who had COVID-19 during their pregnancies,” said Dr. Kristina Adams Waldorf, senior…
Seattle-based biotech Good Therapeutics is being acquired by Roche, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant. According to a release, Roche is paying $250 million in cash upfront for the purchase, which was announced Wednesday, and Roche will make additional payments for hitting certain milestones. The companies expect the deal to close in the third quarter.
Seattle-based biotech Adaptive Biotechnologies Corp. (Nasdaq: ADPT) has inked a royalty financing agreement with health care investment firm OrbiMed worth up to $250 million. Through the agreement, announced Monday, Adaptive will receive an initial $125 million in exchange for OrbiMed receiving 5% of Adaptive’s revenue. Adaptive can receive an additional $75 million for 8% of its revenue and another $50…
A gift of $78 million will seed a new institute at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and support research into precision oncology, a field that aims to assess the biological makeup of cancer in each affected individual. The pledged gift from Stuart and Molly Sloan, announced Thursday, is the largest in the 47-year history of the Seattle-based research institution. Stuart Sloan is the…
Many 12-year-olds focus on sports, the latest video-sharing platform, and wonder how to navigate peer-pressure in middle school. For Aleena Arakaki, the emergence into adolescence was an overwhelming and tragic introduction into the mortality of cancer. Her mother was diagnosed with tongue cancer and given 6 months to live. She passed away two years later. Soon after, Arakaki’s grandmothers were…
A cutting-edge procedure for epilepsy at Seattle Children’s, known as responsive neurostimulation (RNS), is offering hope and seizure reduction relief to some patients who are still looking for solutions after exploring other treatment options. With RNS, a battery-powered device is placed in a patient’s skull to reduce seizures. A neurosurgeon connects thin wires from the device to one or two…
Curevo Vaccine (Curevo), a privately held clinical-stage biotechnology company dedicated to reducing the burden of infectious disease by developing safe and highly-effective vaccines, today announced completion of enrollment in a Phase 2b trial of their CRV-101 subunit vaccine to prevent the reactivation of the varicella zoster virus (shingles) in older adults. CRV-101 is in development to be a potentially well-tolerated, highly…
Omeros Corporation reported results from the narsoplimab arm of the I-SPY COVID Trial, sponsored by Quantum Leap Healthcare Collaborative (QLHC). Analysis in the randomized patient population shows that the addition of narsoplimab to treatment of critically ill patients with COVID-19 reduces the mortality risk (hazard ratio [HR]=0.81, with probability [HR <1] equal to 0.77). Narsoplimab showed the largest reduction in…
Over the past two years, machine learning has revolutionized protein structure prediction. Now, three papers in Science describe a similar revolution in protein design. In the new papers, biologists at the University of Washington School of Medicine show that machine learning can be used to create protein molecules much more accurately and quickly than previously possible. The scientists hope this advance will lead…