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Pfizer highlights diverse oncology oortfolio and combination approaches at ESMO 2024

Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) continues to showcase potential practice-changing research and next-generation candidates across its robust Oncology portfolio at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2024, being held September 13-17 in Barcelona. Data from more than 50 company-sponsored, investigator-sponsored and collaborative research abstracts, including more than 10 oral and mini-oral presentations, will be presented across the company's tumor areas and core scientific modalities, as well as a potential treatment for a cancer-related condition.

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Gene therapy effective in hereditary blindness

Bothnia dystrophy is a form of hereditary blindness, prevalent in the region Västerbotten in Sweden. A new study at Karolinska Institutet published in Nature Communications shows that gene therapy can improve vision in patients with the disease.

Bothnia dystrophy occurs mainly in the region Västerbotten in Sweden, but the disease has also been identified in other parts of the world.

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Drugs prescribed off-label may do more harm than good

A new study from King's College London shows that off-label prescriptions of a common antidepressant doesn't help breathlessness in patients with respiratory disease - and may cause side effects.

Researchers warn prescribing medicines for a use which it has not been licensed could make things worse, even though the prescriber was trying to help.

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A new AI tool for cancer

Scientists at Harvard Medical School have designed a versatile, ChatGPT-like AI model capable of performing an array of diagnostic tasks across multiple forms of cancers.

The new AI system, described Sept. 4 in Nature, goes a step beyond many current AI approaches to cancer diagnosis, the researchers said.

Current AI systems are typically trained to perform specific tasks - such as detecting cancer presence or predicting a tumor's genetic profile - and they tend to work only in a handful of cancer types.

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Adding anti-clotting drugs to stroke care ineffective

Stroke patients who survive a blood clot in the brain's blood vessels are prone to developing new blockages during their recovery periods, even if they receive vessel-clearing interventions. In an effort to avoid further clots, doctors at 57 sites around the U.S. tested a possible solution: the addition of anti-coagulant drugs to medicine that dissolves blood clots.

But results from the clinical trial, led by Opeolu Adeoye, MD, head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, indicate two such drugs did not improve outcomes.

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Immune cells prevent lung healing after viral infection

Investigators involved in a multicenter study co-led by Cedars-Sinai discovered a pathway by which immune cells prevent the lungs' protective barrier from healing after viral infections like COVID-19. The findings, published in Nature may lead to new therapeutic treatment options.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how viral infections can cause long-lasting effects - a condition called long COVID. Also known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, long COVID has left a devastating trail of people who continue to live with long-term debilitation after infection.

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Newly discovered antibody protects against all COVID-19 variants

Researchers have discovered an antibody able to neutralize all known variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as distantly related SARS-like coronaviruses that infect other animals.

As part of a new study on hybrid immunity to the virus, the large, multi-institution research team led by The University of Texas at Austin discovered and isolated a broadly neutralizing plasma antibody, called SC27, from a single patient.

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New pharmaceutically active substances from billions of newly combined molecules

Nowadays, there's lots of buzz about spectacular new medical treatments such as personalised cancer therapy with modified immune cells or antibodies. Such treatments, however, are very complex and expensive and so find only limited application. Most medical therapies are still based on small chemical compounds that can be produced in large quantities and thus at low cost.

The bottleneck in the development of new molecular therapies is the limited number of new active substances that can be found using current techniques. A method developed in the 2000s at Harvard and ETH Zurich promises to provide a remedy: DNA-encoded chemical libraries (DEL).

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Bayer and NextRNA Therapeutics enter strategic collaboration to develop small molecules targeting long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in oncology

Bayer and NextRNA Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on developing transformative medicines to address long non-coding RNA (lncRNA)-driven diseases, have entered into a collaboration and license agreement to develop small molecule therapeutics targeting lncRNAs in oncology. lncRNAs represent a vast class of therapeutic targets that recruit RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) to drive pathological processes across diseases. Disrupting lncRNA-RBP interactions with small molecules represents an innovative approach to develop a new class of therapeutic agents.

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Pfizer launches PfizerForAll™, a digital platform that helps simplify access to healthcare

Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) introduced PfizerForAll, a user-friendly digital platform designed to make access to healthcare and managing health and wellness more seamless for people across the U.S. The new, end-to-end experience will support the millions of Americans affected annually by common illnesses like migraine, COVID-19 or flu, and those seeking to protect themselves with adult vaccinations. By bringing together critical resources and services into a single destination, PfizerForAll helps individuals and their families cut down on the time and steps needed to take important health actions like getting care, filling prescriptions, and finding potential savings on Pfizer medicines.

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