Imagine that you are born deaf and live in a world of silence – what price would you pay for a new treatment that might restore your hearing?
That is the market opportunity that may be available for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies as the basic science around congenital hearing loss starts to yield insights that could translate into new products.
In a letter to the science journal Nature, published online on August 21, 2011, scientists from Northwestern University in Chicago report findings that could help develop drugs for patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
ALS is a progressive, fatal, degenerative motor neurone disease, which results in the inability to walk, get out of bed, move arms, hands, swallow or chew. Unlike Alzheimer’s disease, cognitive functions are not usually impaired, making it a particularly nasty disease when faced with awareness of disease progression.
Today, my attention was caught by The New York Academy of Sciences forthcoming seminar on “Angiogenesis: Breakthroughs in Basic Science and Therapeutic Applications.”
Sponsored by Johnson & Johnson and the Dr Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research, the seminar (free registration) features some distinguished speakers including Napoleone Ferrara, MD who is giving a presentation on the “Discovery of Anti-Angiogenesis Therapies for Cancer and Ocular Disease.”
I’m particularly interested in hearing the panel discussion in the afternoon on the “future of angiogenic medicine,” and the potential of gene transfer therapy as a treatment option.