Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

GlaxoSmithKline Plc will buy a stake in Austria’s Intercell AG in a move that analysts said underscores drugmakers’ growing interest in vaccines. Glaxo will pay 33.6 million euros ($49.5 million) as part of the alliance to develop and market Intercell’s needle-free, patch-based immunizations for traveler’s diarrhea and pandemic influenza. The London-based drugmaker also will buy as much as 5 percent of Intercell for up to 84 million euros via a staggered shareholding option, the companies said in a statement today. XTractor Premium - A Platform for discovery , knowledge sharing, analysis and modelling of published biomedical facts. The only Knowledgebase which provides "manually" annotated facts from PubMed on a weekly basis Innovative Features like Semantic Search , Concept Linking , Bibliographic search , Save, Export and Visualize Only Knowledgebase with daily updations from PubMed XTractor Premium now at an Special Introductory Offer. Subscribe now and save! Re...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have demonstrated that a gel composed of small, woven protein fragments can successfully carry and release proteins of different sizes, potentially enabling the delivery of drugs such as insulin and trastuzumab (Herceptin). Researchers can control the rate of release by changing the density of the gel, allowing for continuous drug delivery over a specific period of time. The team is led by Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering. The gel, known as a "nanofiber hydrogel scaffold," enables a gradual release of the proteins from the gel over hours, days or even months. The gel itself is eventually broken down into harmless amino acids - the building blocks of proteins. Peptide hydrogels are ideally suited for drug delivery as they are pure, easy to design and use, non-toxic, non-immunogenic, bio-absorbable, and can be locally applied to a particular tissue. Composed of self-assembli...