The Needle

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...

ISSUE 13 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 a breakthrough in sequence-based design of peptide binders in the context of the stampede of startups developing AI/machine learning-based peptide design platforms guided by structural data. In the translational literature, E3 ubiquitin ligase biology...

ISSUE 12 Welcome back 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. After a brief summer hiatus, we are delighted to be back. This week, in the context of all the chatter about in-licensing Chinese assets, we highlight a novel target originating from a Hangzhou City biotech. P-selectin glycoprotein ligand-1 (PSGL-1) is a new member of the growing...

ISSUE 11 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 biotech startups from around the world. This week we’re “stuck” on the fast-moving field of ‘molecular’ glue drugs. This is an area that is going places, with a steady stream of new ventures (by our count nearly 30 companies still in the preclinical stages), a burgeoning stream of papers describing new compounds in the literature and...