The Bio Report

While there has been much buzz in the industry over the potential for harnessing the microbiome and using it as a way to treat disease, it remains early days for the therapeutic pipeline. Rebiotix, which is delivering human-derived microbes to treat recurrent Clostridium difficile infections, is ready to move its lead experimental therapeutic into late-stage clinical testing. The company says it i...

Investors bid up biopharmaceutical stocks following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. It reflected a belief that a Trump administration will remove the threat of price controls on drugs and bring about a friendlier regulatory environment at the FDA. We spoke to Amy Brown, senior reporter and author of the EP Vantage 2017 Preview, about what’s in store for the biopharm...

The advent of digital health devices and mobile health apps has the potential to improve care, change patient behavior, and permit doctors to intervene early when the health of a patient changes. But the American Medical Association wants to ensure that as these devices proliferate, doctors have a role in guiding their design and determining their worth. We spoke to James Madara, CEO of the AMA, a...

A clinical trial of an experimental vaccine against HIV that just began in South Africa is raising new hopes of making new strides against the disease. The trial follows recent news of tests in animals that suggest the vaccine, in combination with an innate immune stimulant may be able to put infected patients into remission. We spoke to Colonel Nelson Michael, director of the U.S. Military HIV Re...

Pain takes both a personal toll on individuals who suffer from it and an economic toll on society more broadly. Though there is a wide range of drugs available to treat pain, it’s a problem that is still not well addressed. The need for new pain therapies has become even more acute as the problem of opioid addiction has grown. We spoke to Kerrie Brady, founder and chief business officer of Centrex...

A number of studies have recently called attention to the lack of gender diversity in leadership positions in the life sciences industry. Women in BIO and LifeSci Advisors have taken steps to increase the presence of women in the boardroom of biotech companies through a new training program to get women boardroom ready, as well as the creation of an initiative to help place qualified women onto th...

Perlara is a drug discovery company focused on using model organisms to find treatments for diseases previously believed to be too rare to cure. Recently Perlara entered into a drug discovery and development collaboration with Novartis, a deal that included an equity investment and is seen as validating Perlara’s platform. We spoke to Ethan Perlstein, CEO of Perlara, about the company’s unique app...

There’s been much buzz about the microbiome, but what that constitutes can mean different things to different people. Biosortia Pharmaceuticals is focusing on the aquatic microbiome as a rich source of potential first-in-class small molecules to address unmet medical needs. We spoke to Ross Youngs, founder and CEO of Biosortia, about what makes the aquatic microbiome compelling as a source of new...

It can take up to six years to accumulate enough evidence to support advancing an experimental drug into clinical development. twoXAR is working to rapidly accelerate that process through the use of Big Data and its proprietary algorithms to find screen large public and proprietary data sets to indentify new drug candidates and determine their efficacy. We spoke to Andrew Radin, co-founder and CEO...

Robert Goldman had been a successful Internet age inventor having developed some of the critical technology underlying the way digital music is stored, searched, and purchased online. But when his sister developed cancer, he found himself turning his skills as an inventor into an unchartered area for him. Eventually he developed a new type of catherter to deliver cancer medicines directly to where...

One of the issues researchers face is getting access to needed biospecimens with detailed clinical data that can expand the understanding of a specific disease or treatment. The difficulty in obtaining biospecimens can hamper R&D productivity, extend the time of project, and increase costs. Novaseek has developed a platform that provides access to real world data and supports the ability to define...

Evaluate Pharma, in its latest World Preview report, is projecting solid growth for prescription drug sales through 2022. Driving that growth is both the new products expected to come to market during that time and the industry’s embrace of orphan drugs, the source of half of that growth. We spoke to Antonio Iervolino, head of forecasting for Evaluate, about the new report, the growing number of d...

The growing promise to harness biology to address environmental, agricultural, health, and energy needs is fueling a new bioeconomy. The state of engineering biology will be on display at the SynBioBeta SF 2016 conference in South San Francisco October 4 through October 6. We spoke to John Cumbers, founder of SynBioBeta, about the state of the industry, the challenges it faces, and the long-term p...

About 380,000 infants in the United States—about one in 10— are born prematurely each year. Preterm births, defined as any birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy, is the leading cause of death for infants and puts these babies at greater risk for cerebral palsy, respiratory and cardiovascular complications, and delays in development. Sera Prognostics has developed a predictive diagnostic that can iden...

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies are leading a $15.4 million effort to develop new systems for quickly screening libraries of drugs for potential effectiveness against schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The National Institute of Mental Health is funding the work. We spoke to Hongjun Song, professor of neurology and neurosciences at the...

The recent controversy over Mylan Pharmaceuticals sharp increase to the price of its EpiPen, an emergency injection of epinephrine to treat someone suffering a severe and potentially fatal allergic reaction, has once again ignited public debates over drug pricing. While drugmakers have been in the sights of the public, other players in the supply chain have escaped scrutiny. David Balto, a Washing...

Werner’s and Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndromes are rare, genetic diseases that causes children to appear to suffer from advanced aging at young ages. The syndromes are of particular interest to researchers because of the potential they may have to help understand the biology of normal again and lead to ways to counter aging-related diseases. We spoke to Brian Kennedy, president and CEO of the...

Concern about the spread of the Zika virus has sparked efforts to develop therapies and vaccines to counter it. But the outbreak reflects a growing threat from zoonetic diseases, once thought of as being contained to tropical regions, that are making incursions into the developed world. We spoke to Jim Pannucci, director for infectious disease research at Southern Research, about Zika, the work hi...

Lee Hood was a visionary who helped enable the genomics age. Journalist Luke Timmerman, in his newly published biography of Hood, chronicles the scientist career and achievements, as well as the controversies that surrounded him. We spoke to Timmerman about Hood, the conflicts that shaped his career, and the significance of his contributions to the field of biology.

Despite continued scientific and medical progress, the American Society of Clinical Oncology offered a mixed picture in its annual report on The State of Cancer Care in America earlier this year. While advances have been made in combating some cancers, mortality rates for others remain unchanged or have increased. There’s disparity in care, concerns about the rising cost of therapy, and uncertaint...

People with multiple chronic conditions represent about 5 percent of the patient population in the United States, but account for half of the nation’s healthcare spending. In order to improve care and reduce costs overal there’s an urgent need to do a better job of treating these patients, according to a recent perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine from the heads of five leading healt...

Neglected diseases and drugs to counter addiction represent unmet medical needs, but they have been areas that pharmaceutical companies have been reluctant to pursue. Savant HWP is in clinical development on an experimental drug that targets both of these indications. We spoke to Stephen Hurst, CEO of Savant HWP about the company’s strategy, the unique compound that can address two seemingly unrea...

The use of biomarkers has long held the promise accelerating drug development and producing safer and more targeted drugs to meet the needs of patients. The explosion of genetic, proteomic, and metabolomic data, as well as the emergence of the human microbiome, is rapidly growing the world of biomarkers, but with that comes challenges for researchers and drug developers about knowing what’s availa...

Incubators and accelerators have been proliferating in California, but little has been done to track their activities and analyze their performance. The California Business Incubation Alliance recently released a study of the performance of incubators and accelerators in California, the contribution they make to the state’s economy, and whether they deliver value to the entrepreneurs that use them...

The growing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the evolution of next-generation sequencing technology is giving rise to new approaches to combat what’s become a serious global health threat. Epibiome, which describes itself as a precision microbiome engineering company, is working to develop cocktails of bacteriophages to use in animal and human health. We spoke to Nick Conley, CEO of Ep...