Jul 28, 2022

Aayushi Pratap News Reporter Researchers use adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) as vehicles to deliver CRISPR/Cas systems, correct gene copies and DNA and RNA sequences into human cells as treatment modalities. But the size of the viruses themselves has been a limiting factor for cargo that can be stuffed into it. For instance, gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas and base editors must be divided into two adenoviruses. Now, for the first-time, scientists have engineered a way to shrink base editors, allowing them to be loaded into a single virus particle. David Liu, from MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute, led the research and published a paper Thursday in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription Unlock this story instantly and join 146,500+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free. SIGN UP John Carroll Editor & Founder With booming Shingrix sales filling its financial sails in the wake of the Haleon spinout , the executive team at New GSK repeatedly touted the blockbuster opportunity presented by their RSV vaccine during Q2 calls Wednesday, promising that the best is yet to come as they upped their guidance for the second half while raising the prospect of more M&A. “We are delivering,” CEO Emma Walmsley told analysts, with commercial momentum, pipeline advances and recent late-stage BD moves that are likely to be replicated before the year is out now that they have more flexibility after the Haleon spinout. Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription Unlock this story instantly and join 146,500+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free. SIGN UP Kyle LaHucik Associate Editor Takeda has ended its work with Turnstone Biologics on a solid tumor asset that was in a Phase I/IIa study, upending a 2019 deal that had $900 million in biobucks on the line. The Japanese Big Pharma disclosed it was dropping TAK-605 and returning the armored oncolytic virus back to the New York biotech for “strategic reasons,” according to a quarterly update Thursday morning. Turnstone regains the global rights to the asset, also named RIVAL-01. Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription Unlock this story instantly and join 146,500+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free. SIGN UP Paul Schloesser Associate Editor When AlphaFold first came out, it debuted with the promise of increasing the number of protein structures that could be predicted, a move that had eluded researchers for decades and could prove to become a crucial step to moving drug development to a new height. Now, AlphaFold says its database of protein structures has been massively expanded. Google’s AI outfit and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) announced Thursday that DeepMind’s AlphaFold database now contains the structures of more than 200 million proteins. It’s a substantial jump from where it was a year ago when DeepMind announced that it had predicted the structure of only about 350,000 proteins. Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription Unlock this story instantly and join 146,500+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free. SIGN UP Paul Schloesser Associate Editor Pennsylvania biotech Trevena put out word Thursday morning that it slashed 25% of its full-time staff and terminated a sales force agreement with Syneos, on top of a data readout it touted as positive. The biotech’s only approved product, marketed as Olinvyk, was OK’ed back in 2020 for moderate to severe acute pain. The opioid was originally spurned by the FDA back in 2018 after efficacy data was mixed compared to morphine at key doses and the agency wanted more safety data. Two years later, it got approved for use in a hospital setting, also getting a black box warning about addiction, abuse, respiratory depression and more. Read More