BioMarin Pharmaceutical, a developer of treatments for rare diseases, struck out in a recent attempt to have a drug approved for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Now it’s taking another swing with a drug for a different genetic disease, one that strikes children a couple years after birth, debilitates their bodies and minds, and proves deadly by the time they are teenagers.
Hace cuatro años, Christopher Edginton estaba tomando medicamentos y tratando de mejorar su dieta, pero su colesterol subía de todas maneras.
Su médico le sugirió una nueva estrategia. “Dijo que tenía que dejar de hacer algunas cosas que estaba haciendo, [dejar de lado] algunas de las tensiones en mi vida”, recuerda Edginton, profesor de la Universidad del Norte de Iowa. Debido a sus obligaciones, Edginton viaja regularmente por todo el mundo y ha acumulado tantos títulos que su tarjeta de presentación es desplegable y tiene cuatro lados.
The competition among Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Alexa, and Facebook’s M (still in its early stages), has kept the spotlight on virtual assistants for the last couple of years. The assistants and the technologies that power them, including machine learning and natural-language processing, have piqued the interest of venture capitalists as well.
CEO Kyle Hill spent a lot of time building technology for his parents that would help them find better service for their aging family members — who were around 2,000 miles away across the country. So, when his last startup idea didn’t work out, he decided to bet the company on a new idea around that.
A new cancer immunotherapy company has spun out of Stanford University with backing from a quartet of venture investors and a big hand from the taxpayers of California.
The Palo Alto, CA-based firm, dubbed Forty Seven, emerged Wednesday with a program already in clinical trials, a rarity for an academic spinout. Stanford researchers led by Irving Weissman, the director of the school’s Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine were able to begin testing the drug in humans thanks to $30 million in funding from California’s stem cell agency, known as CIRM.
Earlier this year, consulting firm Frost & Sullivan predicted that artificial intelligence in healthcare will see a “dramatic market expansion” in the next couple of years, with the potential to reduce the cost of medical treatments by half across the board.
“By 2025, AI systems could be involved in everything from population health management, to digital avatars capable of answering specific patient queries,” said Harpreet Singh Buttar, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan.
Adult life can be stressful, and many of us are not sure what to do about it. Well-meaning advice from friends and acquaintances like “just relax!” doesn’t necessarily help because the more we try to relax, the more stressed we get when we don’t succeed. Taking a seaside vacation is not always an option. Yet the stakes are high: Chronic stress raises our risk of infection, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, arthritis and pain.
Pronutria Biosciences has grabbed another large funding round, announcing today a $42.5 million investment from Nestlé Health Science that the company hopes will get its first drug candidates all the way into late-stage clinical trials.
Al menos 450 casos de malformaciones en recién nacidos ha producido la ingesta del antiepiléptico Dépakine (principio activo: ácido Valproico), según un informe de la Inspección General de Asuntos Sociales (Igas) solicitado por el Ministerio de Sanidad francés. El medicamento viene comercializándose desde finales de los años 60 aunque ya en los 80 se conocieron los efectos secundarios que el medicamento podía causar en fetos. La Fiscalía intenta averiguar ahora de donde proviene la negligencia que, según los cálculos de la asociación de víctimas de Dépakine, Apesac, podría haber dejado hasta un millar de niños en esta situación.
