Our Highlights

Christine O’Brien, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, and her team have received a $20,000 prize from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Technology for Maternal Health Challenge.

A nasal vaccine for COVID-19 – based on technology developed at Washington University in St. Louis – is on the path to becoming available in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

The world’s first nasal vaccine for COVID-19 was approved Tuesday, Sept. 6, in India for emergency use. The vaccine, called iNCOVACC, is based on technology licensed from Washington University in St. Louis and developed in collaboration with Bharat Biotech International Limited in India.

The search for effective treatments has been hampered because these highly structured cells cannot be cultured outside of the body, and because immortalized cell lines are not true to their structure. New research from Washington University’s McKelvey School of Engineering and the School of Medicine aims to overcome this critical barrier.

St. Louis-based clinical-stage biotechnology startup Wugen, which has raised more than $200 million in venture funding, has launched a clinical trial for one of its cancer-fighting therapies.

Wugen, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing a pipeline of off-the-shelf cell therapies to treat a broad range of hematological and solid tumor malignancies, today announced that the first patient has been dosed in a Phase 1/2 trial of WU-CART-007 for the treatment of relapsed or refractory (R/R) T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL)/lymphoblastic lymphoma (LBL).

Randall Bateman, M.D. — the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor of Neurology — and colleagues set out to determine the diagnostic accuracy of a new blood test for detecting early signs of AD.

A blood test developed at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has proven highly accurate in detecting early signs of Alzheimer’s disease in a study involving nearly 500 patients from across three continents, providing further evidence that the test should be considered for routine screening and diagnosis.

The startup culture in St. Louis has been strong since the early 2000s, particularly at Washington University in St. Louis, where many successful startups began or have an association, including Square, GiftAMeal, Varsity Tutors, Answers.com, Cardialen and Exegy. And it hasn’t slowed down: the venture capital firm M25 recently named St. Louis the fifth-best Midwest city for startups; St. Louis-based Arch Grants awarded 35 new startups with awards; and T-Rex awarded five $100,000 grants through its GeoSeed Grant Program. In 2020, St. Louis venture capital firm BioGenerator funded 22 startups in health care and agriculture.

A biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny found­ed in 2015 by Dr. Alexan­der Krup­nick and col­leagues at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis and Mer­cury Fund, Couri­er devel­oped a pro­tein ther­a­peu­tics plat­form that has the poten­tial to make can­cer immunother­a­py safer and more effi­ca­cious than treat­ments cur­rent­ly avail­able or in devel­op­ment.