Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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DRIVE

Antios moving ahead with potential drug vs hepatitis B

Antios Therapeutics is moving ahead with Phase I clinical studies in Canada and Europe of an antiviral drug aimed at hepatitis B. Antios was formed in 2018 based on technology licensed from DRIVE, the non-profit drug development company owned by Emory.

Antios is developing ATI-2173, which was designed to direct a form of the drug clevudine to the liver. Pharmasset, formed by Emory scientists and later acquired by Gilead, was previously developing clevudine against hepatitis B. Pharmasset decided to stop clinical studies of clevudine in 2009 because of reports of drug-induced myopathy from South Korea. ATI-2173 is supposed to selectively deliver the drug to the liver, potentially eliminating off-target effects.

(DRIVE is also developing an drug with activity against influenza and the new coronavirus, but hepatitis B – with a weird partly double-stranded DNA genome— is quite different from both flu and coronaviruses. It does underline DRIVE’s experience with antivirals.)

Antios recently announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has issued a notice of allowance for a patent covering ATI-2173. A full description is available from the World Intellectual Property Organization portal.

The patent is based on research carried out at Emory by Antios CEO and co-founder Abel De La Rosa, PhD, who was previously chief scientific officer at DRIVE and Emory Institute for Drug Development, and before that, an executive at Pharmasset. Read more

Posted on February 24, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment