Swiss drugmaker Roche’s push into personalized cancer medicines hit a milestone with Japanese approval of a new drug, Rozlytrek, that targets patients who must be identified via genetic profiling.
Researchers have harnessed the power of social media to build a genetic database, according to a new report.
The statistics are staggering and well-known. Despite an increasing pipeline of drugs targeting rare diseases, 95 percent of the 7,000 disorders classified as rare still have no indicated treatment option. Eighty percent of rare diseases are genetically based, and more than half of the 30 million Americans affected by rare disorders are children. Rare diseases can take five to seven years to be accurately diagnosed, partly because they are inherently difficult to identify and because there are relatively few physicians equipped to recognize and design an appropriate treatment plan for a disorder that will, at most, affect 200,000 people (but often far fewer).
Bayer struck a collaboration deal with Roche’s Foundation Medicine Inc. to develop test kits for genetic sequencing of tumor cells to identify cancer patients that benefit from Bayer’s Vitrakvi drug.
Centogene announced the initiation of a 24-month global study to investigate the genetic factors in Parkinson’s disease.
Gilead Sciences Inc. and Goldfinch Bio Inc. announced a strategic collaboration to discover, develop and commercialize a pipeline of innovative therapeutics for diabetic kidney disease (DKD) and certain orphan kidney diseases.
Environmental factors appear to play a bigger role than genetics in shaping children’s risk for cavities, a study of Australian twins suggests.
With a $75 million infusion of new financing, Massachusetts-based Arrakis Therapeutics will focus the company’s pipeline on oncology and genetically validated targets in other diseases.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals indicated that the company’s ENVISION Phase III trial of givosiran was positive for acute hepatic porphyria (AHP).
The U.S. FDA approved an expanded label for Merck’s anti-PD-1 therapy Keytruda as monotherapy for the first-line treatment of patients with stage III non-small cell lung cancer who are not candidates for surgical resection or definitive chemoradiation, or metastatic NSCLC, and whose tumors express PD-L1 as determined by an FDA-approved test, with no EGFR or ALK genomic tumor aberrations.
