The Bio Report

As a researcher, Joe Garcia applied functional genomics to understanding genes that contribute to inflammatory disorders such as acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS. As founder and CEO of the biotech company Aqualung Therapeutics, he’s working to advance therapies to hit these novel targets to treat uncheck inflammation with the company’s lead experimental therapeutic candidate targeting ARDS. We spoke to Garcia about the company’s ARDS therapy, how it works, and why it’s a timely focus

Bacteriophages have long been used to treat infections. These naturally occurring virus are capable of killing bacteria, but each strain of phage is highly specific. Because of their unique mechanism of action, they provide a potential to address the growing threat posed by multidrug-resistant bacteria, but to treat someone, the right phage must be matched to each patient’s infection. Adaptive Phage Therapeutics believes it’s found a way to create phage therapies suited to treat patients with

As a medical student, David Fajgenbaum nearly died from Castleman disease, a rare autoimmune condition. He would suffer recurring bouts that carried him to the brink of death but was able to push the disease into remission by discovering a drug that could be repurposed to treat the disease. Fajgenbaum co-founded the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network and developed a unique approach to research that is now being adopted by other rare disease organizations. He tells his story in his book “Chasing

As some jurisdictions move to lift shelter in place orders and seek to restore economic life to normal, there’s growing concerns about the health consequences of moving too fast and the failure to make decisions without adequate testing to guide the process. Fred Brown, president and chief operating officer of the big data health consulting firm Fred Brown Management Consulting, discussed beating the COVID-19 pandemic ahead of a piece he’s writing for the fall issue of the Journal of Commercial

Targeting the epigenome—the regulators that turn on and off the activity of genes—has long been viewed as a promising way to treat cancer. But despite the promise of this approach, early efforts brought few successes in part because of the broad effects of hitting these targets. Constellation Pharmaceuticals is taking a next-generation approach to epigenetics, targeting what it calls the writer, reader, and eraser classes of epigenetic regulators to modulate gene expression in a highly selective

Acepodia has developed platform technology that allows it to chemically modify or conjugate living cell surfaces. The technology can be applied to any immune cell and any antibody or binding protein, without the use of genetic engineering. The company is working to apply the technology to create a family of cost-effective, off-the-shelf immunotherapies. We spoke to Sonny Hsiao, CEO of Acepodia, about the company’s platform technology, how it works, and it why it has the potential to change the cost