The Bio Report

There’s been a stunning lack of innovation around male contraceptives when it comes to the area of male contraceptives. Men have the choice between a vasectomy, a procedure innovated in the 19th century, or condoms, which date back to at least King Minos in Crete in 3000 BCE. Next Life Sciences is hoping to change that with its Plan A, an experimental hydrogel that is injected into the vas deferen...

There have been great advances in the treatment of hepatitis C with the advent of curative therapies, but hepatitis B has proven far more elusive. That’s due to differences in the way the virus replicates and how it creates a reservoir of viral DNA in the cells in the liver. nChroma Bio, the result of a merger between Chroma Medicine and Nvelop Therapeutics, thinks it has an answer. It’s developin...

While AI has been seductive in its promise for revolutionizing drug development, one of the constraints remains the quality of the data that is used by any given platform. BPG Bio, an early innovator in the application of AI to drug development as Berg, is taking what it calls a “biology-first” approach. It capitalizes on its proprietary biobank to conduct multi-omics analysis to understand the bi...

Despite the market success of GLP-1 agonists to treat obesity, many patients suffer side effects such as nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. These medicines also cause significant loss of muscle mass. And when someone discontinues use, they often regain the weight they lost. Skye Bioscience is developing nimacimab, an experimental therapy that has the potential to induce weight loss by inhibiting the...

Many companies are seeking to develop non-opioid treatments for pain, but Persica Pharmaceuticals may be taking a surprising approach for chronic low-back pain. The company’s lead experimental therapy for the condition is an antibiotic. That may sound odd, but it turns out that about half of chronic low back pain cases are due to bacterial infections that occur after herniation of the spinal disc...

Though there are plenty of therapeutic alternatives for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, there are no approved biologics for treating acute exacerbations of these conditions. Connect Biopharma believes that’s an opportunity. It's experimental therapy rademikibart has shown promise treating exacerbations and providing sustained improvements. We spoke to Barry Quart, CEO of...

When Vanderbilt University Medical Center began to consider how big data and precision medicine were going to impact both research and development and clinical care, it struck on the idea of building a large-scale biobank and tying it to its store of millions of electronic health records. That ultimately led to the founding of Nashville Bioscience, a for-profit subsidiary of the medical center. We...

Spirulina, also known as blue-green algae, is edible. It can be engineered to cost-effectively produce biologics that can be taken orally. Though people have long sought to do this, Lumen Bioscience has developed platform technology that solved the various challenges is engineering spirulina to produce medicines. We spoke to Brian Finrow, co-founder and CEO of Lumen, about the company’s platform t...

Cancer is a global disease, and BeOne Medicines believes it should develop its cancer therapies for global markets. To do so, it’s taking innovative approaches to clinical trials, pricing, and manufacturing to enable it to support patients not only in high-income countries but also in low- and middle-income countries. We spoke to Matt Shaulis, general manager of North America for BeOne Medicines,...

The advent of immunotherapies is transforming cancer care. While early efforts have focused on enabling T cells to attack cancers, Myeloid Therapeutics is developing next-generation immunotherapies that use mRNA to train myeloid cells to attack cancer. We spoke to Daniel Getts, founder and CEO of Myeloid Therapeutics, about the limitations of existing immunotherapies, the role myeloid cells play i...

Despite having taken steps to prepare for a possible pandemic, the United States fared poorly during the COVID outbreak relative to other developed nations. It also sharpened political divides as conspiracy theories and misinformation spread on social media. In “COVID Wars: America’s Struggle Over Public Health and Personal Freedom,” tech entrepreneur-turned-historian Ronald Gruner takes a deep di...

GLP-1 agonists have been a breakthrough for the treatment of obesity, a global problem with serious health risks. While the benefits of these therapies are seen as outweighing the risks, there have been some concerns about the loss of muscle mass, particularly in older people using these drugs. iBio is developing next-generation obesity therapies that may be able to be used in combination with GLP...

At the end of 2024, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health awarded a team led by the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and including the Foundation Fighting Blindness and six other research groups, up to $46 million to advance research to enable human eye transplants to restore vision in people who are blind. The goal of the project is to make whole eye transplantation a re...

Synthetic biology companies have faced a difficult few years as share prices have been battered and investment in the sector has waned. As investors and companies are readying to gather for the annual SynBioBeta conference in San Jose May 5 through 8, a new report from the bipartisan National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology warns that the United States is at risk of losing its leader...

Until recently, treatments for both chronic and acute pain had been an area that went for decades without the development of innovative new treatments. South Rampart Pharma is seeking to develop safer and more effective pain management therapies that avoid the liver toxicity of acetaminophen, the kidney toxicity of NSAIDs, and the abuse potential of opioids. We spoke to Hernan Bazan, co-founder an...

The Zimin Institute for AI Solutions in Healthcare, a joint initiative between the Zimin Foundation and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, is seeking to accelerate the integration of AI into the life sciences. Although it is pursuing a wide range of opportunities from precision medicine to therapeutic discovery, its primary focus is on addressing real-world problems and conducting tran...

The search for non-opioid pain relievers opioids has focused on pharmaceutical alternatives including non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, antidepressants, and anticonvulsants. Brixton Biosciences is developing Neural Ice, an injectable frozen slurry that can degenerate nerves in targeted areas and provide pain relief for extended periods. The discovery capitalizes on unexpected findings about the e...

Antibodies have been powerful tools for inhibiting a targeted protein. Abalone Bio is pursuing a new class of antibody therapies called activating antibodies that can regulate cellular processes and restore their balance. One aspect that makes these rare antibodies attractive is that they can target previously undruggable G protein-coupled receptors, allowing them to treat diseases that have been...

Jorge Goldstein trained for a career in molecular biology and biochemistry before becoming a patent attorney, a background that positioned him to help shape patent law for the biotech industry throughout his 40-year career. In his new book Patenting Life: Tales from the Front Lines of Intellectual Property and the New Biology, Goldstein offers a history of the biotech industry through the lens of...

Eosinophilic esophagitis is a progressive allergic disease characterized by difficulty swallowing and gastric reflux. It results from an elevated number of inflammatory immune cells in the walls of the esophagus. If left untreated, it can cause long-term complications, including scarring and difficulty swallowing. Revolo Biotherapeutics is developing a synthetic peptide therapy that can potentiall...

NK cells, part of the innate immune system, serve as the body’s first line of defense. These cells can recognize and kill abnormal or infected cells. As therapies, they have the advantage over CAR-T and other cell therapies because they can be used off-the-shelf without undergoing gene editing or other genetic modifications. They also don’t trigger cytokine storms, a common reaction to CAR-T thera...

More than a decade after the approval of a curative therapy for hepatitis C, hepatitis B has proven more challenging to tackle. Vir Biotechnology, in collaboration with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, is developing a promising combination approach that marries Vir’s monoclonal antibody tobivibart with Alnylam’s siRNA elebsiran. We spoke to Mark Eisner, chief medical officer of Vir, about hepatitis B, the...

While GLP-1 agonists have been all the rage in treating obesity, Coya Therapeutics sees potential for these therapies to address inflammatory diseases. In fact, Coya is developing its low-dose interleukin 2 in combination with several different agents. The belief is that its approach will address inflammation by targeting dysfunctional regulatory T cells. The company is pursuing multiple neurodege...

Though cancer vaccines have been an area of great promise, in practice they have faced several challenges because of the heterogeneity of tumors, the ability of the tumor microenvironment to suppress the immune system, and the challenges of producing a strong and sustained T-cell response. OSE Immunotherapeutics’ off-the-shelf cancer vaccine Tedopi has shown promising results in a phase 3 study in...

One of the challenges in treating brain cancer and other diseases of the central nervous system is delivering therapeutics beyond the blood-brain barrier. NeOnc Technologies using a natural compound derived from essential oils in plants that not only can kill cancer cells, but can cross the blood-brain barrier. What’s more, it can transport other therapies as well. We spoke to Thomas Chen, founder...