Monthly Archives: June 2020

The 20 executives — and companies — to know in Chinese biotech

In China, biotechnology long lagged behind the industry in the West. Now, it’s advancing at supersonic speed. The nation, which only began recognizing intellectual property in the 1980s, rapidly transitioned from relying on traditional medicines to adopting generic versions of Western blockbusters. Now, thanks to hundreds of billions in state investment and some dramatic regulatory […]

New biosensor visualizes stress in living plant cells in real time

Plant biologists have developed a new nanosensor that monitors foundational mechanisms related to stress and drought. The new biosensor allows researchers to analyze changes in real time as they happen involving kinases, enzymes that catalyze key biological activities in proteins. Certain kinases are essential since they are known to be activated in response to drought […]

Carbon Nanotube Transistors May Soon Give Waning Moore’s Law a Boost

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have long been touted as a potential material to take us beyond the limits of faltering silicon chips, but they’ve proven tricky to manufacture. Now scientists have demonstrated a way to build CNT transistors in a commercial silicon fabrication plant. Essentially CNTs are rolled-up sheets of the one-atom-thick wonder material graphene. They […]

STAT Plus: ASCO 2020 takeaways: AstraZeneca does a star turn, KRAS fizzles, and cell therapy shows progress

The annual meeting American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) concluded on Sunday. The closely-followed cancer research meeting is typically held over five days in Chicago. But for the first time, this year’s gathering was conducted entirely virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic. And while it ran for just three days — shorter than the normal […]

CRISPR and Droplets offer a new way forward in viral diagnostics?

With the re-opening of societies around the world, increased access to diagnostic tests for diseases like COVID-19 is necessary for public health and appropriate disease tracking and response. PCR-based tests and the more recently developed antigen tests are the primary diagnostics used for SARS-CoV-2 specifically. However, tracking more than just SARS-CoV-2 would give scientists and […]