大农化

Los Angeles-based coffee chain The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf will remove its upcharge for plant-based milk alternatives starting June 3, following a campaign by animal rights organization PETA that included outreach from more than 20,000 supporters and a direct meeting with the company.

Karlijn Sibbel, Chief Innovation Officer at seaweed and plant-based packaging company Notpla, will join eXXpedition’s South Pacific research voyage this June, bringing the perspective of the alternative materials sector to a scientific mission tracing plastic pollution through ocean and land ecosystems.

Parabilis Medicines, the developer of drugs and antibody-drug conjugates targeting historically undruggable protein targets and based on stabilized helical peptides or Helicons™, has filed for an initial public offering (IPO), joining a growing parade of companies seeking to raise capital by tapping into the improving market for first time biotech stocks.

The positive opinion covers the use of Wegovy pill to reduce excess body weight and maintain long-term weight reduction in adults with obesity, or overweight with at least one weight-related comorbidity. According to Novo Nordisk, the opinion also includes data from the SELECT cardiovascular outcomes trial, showing that semaglutide reduces the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events, including cardiovascular death, non-fatal myocardial infarction and non-fatal stroke.

Some types of cancer have a relentless appetite for the metabolite cholesterol, using as much as they can access to accelerate their growth beyond the capabilities of normal cells. Research by scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute and collaborators at the University of Illinois Chicago have now unveiled a potential method for turning the table on these tumors by subverting their cholesterol cravings.

The Nantes-based company said the TEDOVA/GINECO-OV244b/ENGOT-ov58 trial met its primary endpoint in patients with platinum-sensitive recurrent ovarian cancer who had progressed after, or were ineligible for, PARP inhibitors and bevacizumab. In the study, Tedopi combined with Keytruda improved median progression-free survival to 4.1 months, compared with 2.8 months for best supportive care.

The year was 2022. Chris Norn, PhD, was wrapping up his time as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) at University of Washington (UW). AlphaFold was taking the field by storm, while a new generation of deep learning tools was rapidly advancing de novo, or from-scratch, protein design with unprecedented success rates validated at atomic resolution. Within just a few years, these AI breakthroughs,  widespread applications across  pharmaceuticals, nanomaterials, biosensors, and more,  would help earn Norn’s mentor, David Baker, PhD, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.   

Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Nantes Université in France have designed 3D-printed scaffolding trays that will reportedly allow scientists to produce larger versions of functional human gut organoids twice as fast as previous methods—and these organoids grow their own nerve cells.