A Yale School of Medicine genetics professor whose work is helping to advance the understanding of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and ALS is a 2019 winner of Johnson & Johnson’s prestigious Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research.
Arthur L. Horwich shares the award, which comes with a $200,000 prize, with Franz-Ulrich Hartl, MD, director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich, Germany.
The pharmaceutical and consumer health products giant announced the winners on Monday. Three past recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.
The pair were honored for their research on specialized proteins called molecular chaperones, which assist protein folding in cells. Improper folding can play a role in a range of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, according to a Yale release.
The award is given annually to “the most passionate and creative scientist or scientists in basic or clinical research whose achievements have made, or have strong potential to make, a measurable impact on human health through the diagnosis, treatment or prevention of disease,” J&J said.
The award was established in 2004 in memory of Janssen, a renowned researcher and founder of Janssen Pharmaceuticals, now a J&J subsidiary.
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The FDA has cleared a clinical trial on a triple-combination therapy featuring BioXcel Therapeutics Inc.’s (BTI) immuno-oncology drug to treat pancreatic cancer, the New Haven company said Monday.
The trial will study BTI’s innate-immune activator BXCL701 in combination with Merck KgaA and Pfizer’s immunotherapy drug Bavencio (avelumab) and bempegaldesleukin, another experimental cancer drug being developed by San Francisco biotech Nektar.
The combination treatment is being studied as a potential second-line therapy for the disease, which has a five-year survival rate of 10 percent or less in advanced cases.
BTI also announced that U.K. regulators have authorized a trial of BXCL701 combined with Merck’s immunotherapy drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab) for treatment-emergent neuroendocrine prostate cancer (tNEPC), an aggressive form of the disease.
That therapy is already in Phase 1/2b clinical trials in the United States.
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A senior member of Melinta Therapeutics Inc.’s now-defunct New Haven research team has landed at Farmington biotech Azitra Inc. as vice president of research.
The company said it tapped Trudy H. Grossman to help lead an expansion of its clinical development programs.
Grossman was previously senior director of biology and pharmacology at Melinta. The antibiotics-maker shuttered its New Haven office in March after eliminating the company’s discovery research program.
Azitra, which was spun out of Yale in 2014, is using microbiome science to develop treatments for skin disease. The microbiome refers to the community of bacteria and other organisms that inhabit the gut and skin.
Contact Natalie Missakian at news@newhavenbiz.com
