An Alzheimer’s drug that is being developed by Biogen and Eisai is showing some positive results. The newly developed drug that is currently in a phase three trial showed that the experimental monoclonal antibody reduced cognitive decline caused by the disease by 27% after 18 months.
About 2000 people with early-onset Alzheimer’s were included in this research trial, which started in 2019, in which half the patients were given two injections per week of Lecanemab, while the other participants had a placebo. The researcher gauged the subjects’ level of dementia symptoms at the start of the study. The therapy group’s score was 0.45 points (27% less) after 18 months compared to the placebo group’s score.
According to a media outlet, Tara Spires-Jones, a professor of neurodegeneration at the University of Edinburgh’s UK Dementia Research Institute, said, “If the data holds up to scrutiny, this is indeed fantastic news. While this is not a “cure” in that it doesn’t bring people back to normal, slowing cognitive decline and preserving the ability to perform normal daily activities would still be a huge win because people could live well for longer with Alzheimer’s disease.”
Sudo Biosciences closed on $37M in Series A financing led by Frazier Life Sciences and Velosity Capital. The Series A funding will be used primarily to advance Sudo’s lead drug candidates into the clinic. Founded in 2020, Sudo’s lead programs target the TYK2 pseudokinase domain. TYK2 is a key mediator in cytokine signaling pathways that have been linked to a broad range of immune-mediated inflammatory conditions.
Inhibiting TYK2 has been shown to be beneficial in the treatment of psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, and lupus. Additional evidence suggests that TYK2 inhibition could provide benefit in an even broader range of autoimmune disorders such as ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, ankylosing spondylitis, multiple sclerosis, and others. According to Scott Byrd, CEO, Sudo Biosciences. “TYK2 inhibitors are quickly emerging as the next major class of anti-inflammatory therapeutics. In a short period of time, we have developed four distinct TYK2 pseudokinase programs in our pipeline, which are all uniquely positioned to be a best-in-class category leader.”
Menlo Park-based Meliora Therapeutics announced today the close of an $11M seed financing round led by HOF Capital and ZhenFund, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Village Global, BrightEdge (the impact investment arm of the American Cancer Society), Pebblebed (fund of Keith Adams, former Chief Architect at Slack), Axial, Olive Capital, and prominent individual investors Michael Polansky (co-founder of Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and ArsenalBio), Wes Sterman (founding investor for Gilead), and others. The seed funding will be used to expand Meliora’s computational platform, which includes building a proprietary data moat and selecting mischaracterized scaffolds as strong starting points for its lead precision therapeutic programs.
Kaleidoscope announced the completion of a $6M seed financing round, co-led by Hummingbird Ventures and Dimension, with participation from Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Hawktail, and individual investors. The funding will be used to invest in product development and team expansion, with a focus on software engineers. Kaleidoscope is a cloud-based research platform that serves as a “scientific hub”, mapping the location of data, who has interacted with it, and why. By using Kaleidoscope to track how experiments relate to each other, companies can make better product and pipeline decisions, faster.
The platform keeps R&D teams in sync by centralizing a bird’s eye view of projects and data being generated and automates outcomes through smart integrations with other software. This enables scientists to read from and write to the other tools in their tech stack, in an intuitive way, to enhance collaboration at each stage of the research process. Researchers can now plan and track scientific work across both wet lab and computational teams, enabling more closed-loop systems to accelerate R&D.
Daxor Corporation recently announced new data validating the benefits of the Company’s BVA-100 diagnostic blood test in reducing hospital length of stay (LOS) for heart failure (HF) patients. Data were presented at the Heart Failure Society of America (HFSA) Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) 2022. The study titled “Length of Stay After Blood Volume Analysis in Hospitalized Heart Failure” compared both hospital admission and discharge dates, allowing the calculation of pre-and post-BVA LOS for all patients. Those who received BVA-guided treatment on the day of admission to the hospital had a highly significant (p <0.001) lower total LOS than controls (2.04 vs. 4.56 days) and significantly improved outcomes (lower 30-day readmissions and 365-day mortality).
“This important study shows that BVA has the ability to help clinicians treat patients more effectively so that they get out of the hospital faster and have better results in terms of mortality and readmission when compared to those who did not receive BVA-guided care,” stated Michael Feldschuh, CEO and President of Daxor Corporation.
