Business Wire | September 08, 2020
Aptorum Group Limited (Nasdaq: APM, Euronext Paris: APM) (“Aptorum Group”), a biopharmaceutical company focused on novel therapeutics including the development of next-generation therapeutics targeting antimicrobial resistance, today announced it joined the Biotech companies in Europe combating Antimicrobial Resistance Alliance based in Europe (the “BEAM Alliance”) as full member. The BEAM Alliance is a network of approximately 70 small and medium-sized European companies involved in developing innovative products and kits to tackle antimicrobial resistance (“AMR”), including small molecule antibiotics, biologics, products with a prophylaxis indication, microbiome-based and phage-based therapies, immune targeting therapies, anti-biofilm agents, and medical devices, including in-vitro diagnostics.
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Sestina Bio | October 17, 2020
Sestina Bio, a new company creating a platform for automated synthetic biology, today announced that it has launched with seed funding from Foresite Capital, General Inception and OMX Ventures. The funds will be used to further the development of its digital cellular engineering and phenotyping platforms and support initial product development. The firm is the first company to launch from incubator Foresite Labs. Practitioners of synthetic biology aim to engineer novel living organisms -- usually yeast and bacteria -- that produce new materials, fine and bulk chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, or which act as sensors that report on their environment. By combining new instruments for single cell genome editing, tools for single cell phenotyping, and closed-loop, machine learning-driven design and control of experiments, Sestina is developing the next generation of the automated synthetic biology toolkit. Sestina will harness these tools to rapidly and deterministically engineer new biological capabilities and produce novel products across several verticals.
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CELL AND GENE THERAPY
Vizgen | August 31, 2021
Vizgen, the life science company dedicated to improving human health by visualizing single-cell spatial genomics information, today announced shipment of the first commercial MERSCOPETM Platforms, marking the successful start of their limited summer release program. These first platforms are being purchased by leading research institutes including the Salk Institute, the University of California, Irvine, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Vizgen will continue shipping a limited number of commercial instruments for the next several months before releasing MERSCOPE to the U.S. market at large in late 2021.
MERSCOPE is the first commercially available high-plex single-cell spatial genomics platform, and the only platform for MERFISH technology. Developed in the laboratory of Dr. Xiaowei Zhuang, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and David B. Arnold, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, MERFISH provides the highest detection efficiency available for spatially profiling gene expression across whole tissues and resolving individual transcripts with nanometer-scale resolution through combinatorial labeling, sequential imaging, and error-robust barcoding.
“This is a revolutionary time for the field of genomics. Researchers across the country are now able to access the spatial dimension to answer new kinds of scientific questions and make significant biological discoveries,” said Terry Lo, President and CEO of Vizgen. “Profiling the expression of hundreds of genes, in hundreds of thousands of cells, for hundreds of millions of transcripts all while retaining the spatial information within the tissue architecture has never been done before. What was previously unimaginable, MERSCOPE now makes routine.”
About Vizgen
Vizgen is dedicated to pioneering the next generation of genomics, providing tools that demonstrate the possibilities of in situ single cell spatial genomics, setting the standard for the spatial genomics field. These tools are enabling researchers to gain new insight into the biological systems that govern human health and disease with spatial context. The company's MERSCOPETM platform enables massively multiplexed, genome-scale nucleic acid imaging with high accuracy and unrivaled detection efficiency at subcellular resolution. MERSCOPE provides transformative insight into a wide range of tissue-scale basic research and translational medicine in oncology, immunology, neuroscience, infectious disease, developmental biology, cell and gene therapy, and is an essential tool for accelerating drug discovery and development.
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