The Needle

ISSUE 20 Welcome to The Needle, a newsletter from Haystack Science to help you navigate the latest translational research, with a roundup of the latest news on preclinical biotech startups from around the world. In this issue, we look at one of biotech’s hottest areas—multi-specific antibodies. Although the hype has somewhat dissipated since Akeso’s September announcement of disappointing overall survival data from the HARMONi-A study of its bi-specific (PD-1 x VEGF) ivonescimab in lung...

ISSUE 19 Welcome to The Needle, a newsletter from Haystack Science to help you navigate the latest translational research, with a roundup of the latest news on preclinical biotech startups from around the world. In this issue, we cover an exciting proof of principle for designing antibodies from scratch using machine learning. Our scan of preclinical startups disclosing research either at meetings or in journals returned a bumper crop. Financings of preclinical startups also ticked over at a...

ISSUE 18 Welcome to The Needle, a newsletter from Haystack Science to help you navigate the latest translational research, with a roundup of the latest news on preclinical biotech startups from around the world. In this issue, we take a look at Treg cell therapy following the announcement of the Nobel prize. In keeping with the Treg theme, we noted that newly relocated US startup Regcell published a couple of papers in prominent journals. Our survey of the translational literature highlights...

ISSUE 17 Welcome to The Needle, a newsletter from Haystack Science to help you navigate the latest translational research, with a roundup of the latest news on preclinical biotech startups from around the world. In this issue, promising clinical results for UniQure’s AAV serotype 5 delivered synthetic miRNA in Huntington’s patients prompted us to take a look at the commercial landscape for companies pursuing the truncated huntingtin (HTT) exon1 transcript and its product. Our survey of the...

ISSUE 16 Welcome to The Needle, a newsletter from Haystack Science to help you navigate the latest translational research, with a roundup of the latest news on preclinical biotech startups from around the world. This issue, we take a look at epigenome editing, which has its first products entering the clinic and continues to bear fruit with some recent compelling preclinical efficacy in metabolic and neurodevelopmental disorders. In our survey of the translational literature, startups...

ISSUE 15 Welcome to The Needle, a newsletter from Haystack Science to help you navigate the latest translational research, with a roundup of the latest news on preclinical biotech startups from around the world. This issue, along with the Lasker prize, we celebrate the drug hunters at Vertex Pharmaceuticals/Aurora Biosciences who discovered and developed small-molecule potentiators and correctors of the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR). These drugs have forever...

ISSUE 14 Welcome to The Needle, a newsletter from Haystack Science to help you navigate the latest translational research, with a roundup of the latest news on preclinical biotech startups from around the world. This issue we highlight an important, emerging class of therapeutic that seeks to dampen low-grade sterile inflammation mediated by the inflammasome. This protein complex and its component, nucleotide-binding domain (NOD)-like receptor protein 3 (NLRP3), is not just another...