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Licensing provisions that obligate recipients of government funding to share relevant technology and know-how for scarce drugs during pandemics and epidemics can reduce shortages and overcome obstacles that intellectual property rights present.
As innovations in the biotechnology sector continue to proliferate, the traditional education of medical students, residents and fellows will need to change to incorporate innovation as a core tenet of training.
A US decision to award a set of key patents related to CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing to the Broad Institute could spell the end for a long-running dispute over inventorship with the University of California and the University of Vienna.
For the raft of new ventures developing epigenome editors, a compelling niche may be diseases of haploinsufficiency or genome imprinting that require exquisite control of gene expression.
Using a combination of metagenomic big data and deep learning tools, small proteins that inhibit pathogens — and could be further developed into novel antibiotics — are mined en masse. Such methods could greatly improve the throughput of drug discovery and translational usage of the microbiome.
A new method uses synthetic introns to express therapeutic proteins selectively in cells bearing cancer-initiating mutations affecting RNA splicing factors, while healthy cells remain unaffected. This approach enabled the eradication of human leukemia, breast cancer and uveal melanoma cells in mouse models and significantly prolonged host survival.
