February 8, 2023

Keyron nomme un nouveau président-directeur général

Carl D Francis prend les rênes du groupe de technologies médicales axé sur le renversement du diabète, de la stéatohépatite non-alcoolique (SHNA) et de l’obésité

LONDRES, 07 févr. 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Keyron, le groupe de technologies médicales axé sur le renversement du diabète de type 2, de la stéatohépatite non-alcoolique (SHNA) et de l’obésité via une plateforme de dispositifs médicaux innovants, a annoncé aujourd’hui la nomination de Carl D Francis au poste de président-directeur général.

« La hausse constante de l’obésité, du diabète et de toutes les formes de stéatose hépatique constitue l’un des plus grands défis auxquels le monde est confronté aujourd’hui. Des milliards de personnes sont littéralement affectées et les chiffres ne cessent d’augmenter rapidement », a déclaré M. Francis. « La technologie de Keyron change entièrement la donne. Un traitement innovant, non-chirurgical, administré de manière endoscopique et entièrement réversible est extrêmement prometteur en tant qu’alternative aux interventions bariatriques drastiques. Je suis très fier et honoré de faire partie de Keyron. »

D’après l’American Diabetes Association, 37 millions d’Américains souffrent aujourd’hui de diabète, et 96 millions sont atteints de prédiabète. Le lien entre l’obésité et le diabète est bien établi, et selon les prévisions de la World Obesity Federation dans son Atlas 2022 récemment publié, 67 % des femmes et 51 % des hommes dans les Amériques vivront avec l’obésité (IMC ≥ 30) d’ici 2030.

La technologie brevetée de Keyron est conçue pour être une procédure ambulatoire entièrement endoscopique fournissant des avantages gastriques identiques ou supérieurs aux interventions chirurgicales de pontage gastrique, notamment un renversement du diabète de type 2 et de l’obésité, ainsi que de la SHNA et de la fibrose hépatique.

Suite à des études fructueuses réalisées sur des rongeurs en 2019 puis sur des porcs en 2022, les premiers essais de Keyron sur des humains devraient débuter au début de l’année 2024. Keyron espère obtenir l’approbation de la FDA d’ici 2028, et un lancement est prévu aux États-Unis en tant que premier marché cible. La société projette désormais de lever un tour de financement de série A de 15 millions de dollars.

Le Dr Giorgio Castagneto Gissey, président du conseil d’administration de Keyron, a commenté : « Nous sommes ravis que Carl prenne la direction de Keyron alors que nous entrons dans cette phase cruciale de notre développement. Carl apporte son énergie, sa concentration et son expérience de leadership pour s’assurer que nous réalisons notre plein potentiel. Keyron a toujours eu des membres du conseil d’administration et des conseillers médicaux de haut niveau et de renommée mondiale, et nous continuons à recruter des personnes remarquables. Nous sommes extrêmement ravis d’avoir été en mesure d’attirer Carl. »

M. Francis a précédemment occupé le poste de PDG du célèbre groupe de nanotechnologies P2i. Au cours de son mandat, le groupe est passé d’une poignée d’employés à un leadership mondial dans le domaine du nano-revêtement fonctionnel. Plus récemment, il était le PDG du groupe de technologies médicales basé au Royaume-Uni Eyoto, qui se spécialise dans les technologies avancées dans les secteurs optiques et ophtalmiques. Il a débuté sa carrière en tant qu’expert-comptable certifié aux États-Unis, est membre de Mensa et titulaire d’un BSc de l’université de Cincinnati.

CONTACT

Pour tout complément d’information, veuillez contacter :

Aux États-Unis – Carl D Francis à l’adresse c.francis@keyron.com ou en composant le +1 (912) 429-3800
En Europe – Dr Giorgio Castagneto Gissey à l’adresse gcgissey@keyron.com ou en composant le +44 7975 911101

À PROPOS DE KEYRON

Basée au Royaume-Uni, Keyron est une société qui se spécialise dans les plateformes technologiques et les dispositifs médicaux au stade préclinique visant un traitement hautement efficace pour les maladies métaboliques. La solution brevetée ForePass de Keyron est un dispositif médical innovant conçu pour inverser de manière sûre le diabète de type 2, ainsi que la stéatohépatite non-alcoolique (SHNA) et l’obésité. La société a déjà démontré un renversement complet de la résistance à l’insuline dans des études réalisées sur des animaux, dont elle a récemment publié les résultats dans la revue The Lancet EBioMedicine. Keyron prévoit d’effectuer prochainement des essais cliniques en Amérique du Sud et vise à mener par la suite d’autres études cliniques aux États-Unis. Ses fondateurs, directeurs, conseillers et investisseurs incluent certains des professeurs et leaders d’opinion les plus réputés et cités à l’échelle mondiale dans le domaine des maladies métaboliques. La société est soutenue par plusieurs investisseurs institutionnels basés aux États-Unis et dans la région EMOA.

GlobeNewswire Distribution ID 8744743

February 8, 2023

US Students’ ‘Big Idea’ Could Help NASA Explore the Moon

Last November, Northeastern University student Andre Neto Caetano watched the live, late-night launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a cellphone placed on top of a piano in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying in California.

“I had, not a flashback, but a flash-forward of seeing maybe Artemis 4 or something, and COBRA, as part of the payload, and it is on the moon doing what it was meant to do,” Caetano told VOA during a recent Skype interview.

Artemis 1 launched the night before Caetano and his team of scholars presented their Crater Observing Bio-inspired Rolling Articulator (COBRA) rover project at NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge. The team hoped to impress judges assembled in the remote California desert.

“They were skeptical that the mobility solutions that we were proposing would actually work,” he said.

That skepticism, said Caetano, came from the simplicity of their design.

“It’s a robot that moves like a snake, and then the head and the tail connect, and then it rolls,” he said.

NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge prompted teams of college students to compete to develop solutions for the agency’s ambitious goals in the upcoming Artemis missions to the moon, which Caetano explains are “extreme lunar terrain mobility.”

Northeastern’s COBRA is designed to move through the fine dust, or regolith, of the lunar surface to probe the landscape for interesting features, including ice and water, hidden in the shadows of deep craters.

“They never could … deploy a robot or a ground vehicle that can sort of negotiate the environment and get to the bottom of these craters and look for ice water content,” said professor Alireza Ramezani, who advises the COBRA team and has worked with robotic designs that mimic the movements of real organisms, something Caetano said formed a baseline for their research.

“With him building a robot dog and robot bat, we knew we wanted to have some ‘bioinspiration’ in our project,” Caetano said.

Using biology as the driving force behind COBRA’s design was also something Ramezani hoped would win over judges in NASA’s competition.

“Our robot sort of tumbled 80 to 90 feet (24-27 meters) down this hill and that … impressed the judges,” he told VOA. “We did this with minimum energy consumption and within, like, 10 or 15 seconds.”

Caetano said COBRA weighs about 7 kilograms, “so the fact that COBRA is super light brings a benefit to it, as well.”

Ramezani added that COBRA is also cost-effective.

“If you want to have a space-worthy platform, it’s going to be in the order of $100,000 to $200,000. You can have many of these systems tumbling down these craters,” he said.

The Northeastern team’s successful COBRA test put to rest any lingering skepticism, sending them to the top of NASA’s 2022 BIG Idea competition and hopefully — in the not-too-distant future — to the top of NASA’s Space Launch System on its way to the moon.

“I’m not saying this, our judges said this. It’s potentially going to transform the way future space exploration systems look like,” said Ramezani. “They are even talking to some of our partners to see if we can increase technology readiness of the system, make it space worthy, and deploy it to the moon.”

Which is why, despite his impending graduation later this year, Caetano plans to continue developing COBRA alongside his teammates.

“Because we brought it to life together, the idea of just fully abandoning it at graduation probably doesn’t appeal to most of us,” Caetano said. “In some way or another, we still want to be involved in the project, in making sure that … we are still the ones who put it on the moon at some point.”

That could happen as soon as 2025, the year NASA hopes to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the Artemis program.

Source: Voice of America

February 8, 2023

First batch of locally produced shrimp to hit Seychelles’ market in April

The first batch of white shrimp grown in Seychelles is expected to hit the local market around April said the chief executive of the Islands Development Company (DC), Glenny Savy, on Wednesday.

The IDC is mass producing shrimps on Coetivy, one of Seychelles outer islands.

“Unfortunately, the first batch will not be enough for the whole population, but we will be putting them in stores in April. We expect that by next year, it will be available in numbers for local consumption,” said Savy.

He said that the first batch will also be sold to hotels and tourism establishments in the island nation in the western Indian Ocean.

At the moment, there are nine ponds being used to produce the whiteleg shrimp. Production of the black tiger prawns is expected to start soon.

The whiteleg shrimp is a short-lived prawn and is the largest prawn in its range, reaching lengths of nearly 20 cm. It is one of the more highly sought-after seafood species.

As for the black tiger prawns, they are large-bodied prawns that are native to the Indo-West Pacific Ocean but have established invasive populations in other areas. Tiger prawns get their common name from the stripes that cover their shell.

“It will take us about a year to arrive at full 200 tonnes production capacity and when that happens, we expect to have fresh and frozen prawns entering the market every week or 10 days,” added Savy.

IDC’s CEO explained that they are using a number of money-saving techniques for the prawns production, which will allow the company to give Seychellois consumers the product at a more affordable price than their imported alternative.

“We have not determined an exact price for the moment, but we do expect it to be lower than what is available at the moment, because if it is not cheaper than what is already available, then there is no point in producing it,” Savy added.

Prawn farming is not new to Seychelles. In 1989, in collaboration with the Seychelles Marketing Board (SMB), IDC developed a black tiger prawn farm on Coetivy Island, with broodstocks imported from Madagascar and Mozambique. The partnership between the two companies was over before the prawn farm was deemed not profitable and ceased its operations in 2009.

Source: Seychelles News Agency

February 8, 2023

COVID Treatment Shows Encouraging Results in Trial, Study Says

A single-injection antiviral treatment for newly infected COVID-19 patients reduced the risk of hospitalization by half in a large-scale clinical trial, a study published Wednesday said.

Stanford University professor Jeffrey Glenn, co-author of the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, said the new drug “showed profound benefits for vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike.”

While the number of Americans dying daily of the disease caused by a coronavirus has fallen to about 500, treatments for COVID-19 remain limited. One of the most common — Paxlovid, made by Pfizer — involves taking 30 pills over five days.

The new treatment involves a single dose of pegylated interferon lambda, a synthetic version of a naturally occurring protein that infected cells secrete to defend against viral infection.

“What it does is it binds receptors on the surfaces of cells that activate our own antiviral defense mechanisms,” said Glenn, a professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology who heads the Stanford Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness Initiative.

“So if a virus has infected the cell, it will turn on processes that aim to destroy the virus’s replication,” he said. “It will also send signals to neighboring cells to warn them viruses are on their way and get ready to defend yourself.”

Receptors for interferon lambda are primarily in the linings of the lungs, airways and intestine — the main places COVID-19 strikes.

“We’re turning on these antiviral mechanisms in the cells, the lung, where the infection is happening,” Glenn said.

The phase three trial of the drug, conducted from June 2021 to February 2022, involved nearly 2,000 patients with COVID symptoms in Brazil and Canada, about 85 percent of whom had been vaccinated.

A total of 931 newly infected COVID patients were given a single injection of interferon lambda, while 1,018 participants were given a placebo.

The risk of COVID-19–related hospitalization or death from any cause was 47 percent lower in the interferon group than in the placebo group, according to the researchers.

Twenty-five of the 931 people who received the injection within seven days of exhibiting COVID symptoms were hospitalized, compared with 57 of the 1,018 who received the placebo.

Vaccinated patients treated with interferon lambda experienced a 51 percent reduction in hospitalization relative to the placebo group.

There was an 89 percent reduction in hospitalization among unvaccinated patients treated within the first three days of the onset of COVID symptoms compared with the placebo group.

Developed for hepatitis D

Glenn said interferon lambda proved effective against all COVID variants tested, including omicron, and side effects in the group receiving the injections were no greater than among the placebo recipients.

Glenn is the founder of a small biotechnology company called Eiger Biopharmaceuticals that acquired interferon lambda to develop drugs for the hepatitis delta virus.

“When COVID came, I said this would be the perfect drug for COVID,” said Glenn, who left the Palo Alto company but remains on the board of directors and is an equity holder.

Eiger sought an emergency use authorization for interferon lambda from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for COVID treatment last year, but it was not granted.

That was “very frustrating,” Glenn said, though he was hopeful that publication of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine “will help encourage regulators here and around the world to find a way to get lambda into patients as soon as possible.”

Source: Voice of America