Business Announcement

Hormones are crucial to prevent, treat, and manage many of the world's most common diseases. They are important to good human health and wellbeing. The role of hormonal health and disease in European Health Policies has so far been insufficiently recognized. This is why The European Society of Endocrinology (ESE), together with the European Hormone and Metabolism Foundation – Foundation of the European Society of Endocrinology (ESE Foundation) and its partner societies are therefore launching the first European Hormone Day, on 23 May.

Today, ILSI, formerly known as the International Life Sciences Institute, announced it has rebranded. The effort includes a new logo, a refreshed visual identity and an updated website, which all reflect the organization’s evolution and its aspirations for the future.

In partnership with Verizon, the NYC Media Lab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering today announced the winners of the $1M Museum Initiative—a nationwide open call for museums and cultural institutions to develop and offer new immersive educational content available to all educators on the Verizon Innovative Learning HQ portal.

Northpond Labs, the R&D-focused affiliate of Northpond Ventures, has signed an agreement to support a second Wyss Institute project and accelerate its development toward commercialization. The new agreement funds SomaCode, led by Soufiane Aboulhouda, Oliver Dodd, and George Church, Ph.D. SomaCode aims to solve a key problem plaguing cell therapies: delivering therapeutic cells to their targets in the body. Because cell therapies are administered via the blood, it's currently very difficult to get them to home to a specific organ or tissue. SomaCode’s pooled in vivo discovery platform identifies molecular "zip codes" on target tissues that can be used to improve immune cell delivery to solid tumors and other diseases.

The research and resource development efforts of the Rett Syndrome Research Trust (RSRT) have helped generate an eighth biopharmaceutical program that tackles the root cause of Rett syndrome. Neurogene, a company founded on the vision to push the boundaries of genetic medicine to address complex and devastating neurological diseases, today announced that it will be expanding the company’s development pipeline with the addition of NGN-401 for Rett syndrome. NGN-401 is a gene replacement approach that utilizes Neurogene’s novel EXACT gene regulation technology. Stuart Cobb, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Neurogene and Simons Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, presented preclinical efficacy and safety data for NGN-401 at the 25th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy. Gene replacement is one of six strategies championed by RSRT to target the root cause of Rett syndrome and is the strategy closest to the clinic.