Thursday, December 19

Tag: biology

This $5 Billion Biotech Home Run Took Less Than a Year
25Oct By adminNo Comments
Money

This $5 Billion Biotech Home Run Took Less Than a Year

You can’t completely blame Pfizer’s executives, yet Roche’s $7 billion acquisition of a bowel-disease treatment that it owned until last year isn’t a great look.In a deal that now feels like a biotech version of “Moneyball,” Roivant announced it was selling an asset that only 11 months ago it got for free from Pfizer. (The Wall Street Journal had reported the talks back in July). Big pharma companies focused on the drug industry equivalent of free agent signings will often overlook one of their own hot prospects. In fact, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy founded Roivant on the idea that pharma’s trash can be another company’s treasure. But this one became an almost instant All-Star.Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c...
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This $5 Billion Biotech Home Run Took Less Than a Year
24Oct By adminNo Comments
World

This $5 Billion Biotech Home Run Took Less Than a Year

You can’t completely blame Pfizer’s executives, yet Roche’s $7 billion acquisition of a bowel-disease treatment that it owned until last year isn’t a great look.In a deal that now feels like a biotech version of “Moneyball,” Roivant announced it was selling an asset that only 11 months ago it got for free from Pfizer. (The Wall Street Journal had reported the talks back in July). Big pharma companies focused on the drug industry equivalent of free agent signings will often overlook one of their own hot prospects. In fact, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy founded Roivant on the idea that pharma’s trash can be another company’s treasure. But this one became an almost instant All-Star.Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c...
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Why Scientists Are Bugging the Rainforest
17Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

Why Scientists Are Bugging the Rainforest

Bioacoustics can’t fully replace ecology fieldwork, but can provide reams of data that would be extremely expensive to collect by merely sending scientists to remote areas for long stretches of time. With bioacoustic instruments, researchers must return to collect the data and swap batteries, but otherwise the technology can work uninterrupted for years. “Scaling sampling from 10, 100, [or] 1,000 sound recorders is much easier than training 10, 100, 1,000 people to go to a forest at the same time,” says Donoso.“The need for this kind of rigorous assessment is enormous. It will never be cost-effective to have a kind of boots-on-the-ground approach,” agrees Eddie Game, the Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist and director of conservation for the Asia Pacific region, who wasn’t involved in th...
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Magnetic Minerals May Have Given Life Its Molecular Asymmetry
16Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

Magnetic Minerals May Have Given Life Its Molecular Asymmetry

Naaman and his team discovered that chiral molecules filter electrons based on the direction of their spin. Electrons with one spin orientation will move more efficiently across a chiral molecule in one direction than the other. Electrons with the opposite spin move more freely the other way.To understand why, imagine throwing a Frisbee that glances off the wall of a hallway. If the Frisbee hits the right-hand wall, it will bounce forward only if it’s rotating clockwise; otherwise, it will bounce backward. The opposite will happen if you hit the Frisbee off the left-hand wall. Similarly, chiral molecules “scatter the electrons according to their direction of rotation,” Naaman said. He and his team named this phenomenon the chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect.Because of that scat...
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How Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis
1Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

How Insect Brains Melt and Rewire During Metamorphosis

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats, and reproducing. Small clutches of the eggs they lay hang from long stalks on the underside of leaves and sway like fairy lights in the wind.The dangling ensembles of eggs are beautiful but also practical: They keep the hatching larvae from immediately eating their unhatched siblings. With sickle-like jaws that pierce their prey and suck them dry, lacewing larvae are “vicious,” said James Truman, a professor emeritus of development, cell and molecular biology at the University o...
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The Secret of How Cells Make ‘Dark Oxygen’ Without Light
25Sep By adminNo Comments
Technology

The Secret of How Cells Make ‘Dark Oxygen’ Without Light

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with a global volume nearly twice that of all the world’s oceans. Little is known about these underground organisms, who represent most of the planet’s microbial mass and whose diversity may exceed that of surface-dwelling life forms. Their existence comes with a great puzzle: Researchers have often assumed that many of those subterranean realms are oxygen-deficient dead zones inhabited only by primitive microbes keeping their metabolisms at a crawl and scraping by on traces of nutrients. As those resources get depleted, it was thought, the underground environment must become lifeless with greater depth.In new research publi...
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The Brash Strategy That Made Vivek Ramaswamy a Fortune
9Sep By adminNo Comments
World

The Brash Strategy That Made Vivek Ramaswamy a Fortune

Updated Sept. 9, 2023 10:51 am ETVivek Ramaswamy was a novice biotech entrepreneur in 2016 with no advanced medical training and no record of developing drugs. Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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