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For several years anti-abortion advocates have been warning that a new technology for enhancing flavors such as sweetness and saltiness uses aborted fetal cells in the process. The biotech company using this novel process, Senomyx, has signed contracts with Pepsi, Ajinomoto Co. (the maker of aspartame and meat glue), Nestlé and other food and beverage companies over the past several years. The primary goal for many of these processed food companies is to make foods and beverages tasty while reducing sugar and salt content. While Senomyx refuses to disclose the details of the process, its patent applications indicate that part...

Biotechnology company ReNeuron Group Plc said its experimental stem cell therapy helped some patients improve motor functions in their arms in a mid-stage study after being disabled by stroke. Shares of the company jumped 22 percent to 3.45 pence per share in morning trade on Monday on the London Stock Exchange. ReNueron's trial adds to a small but growing number of studies being conducted by a few publicly listed companies around the world that are testing stem cell therapies in various indications. Stem cell therapy development has been stalled in the past by stricter regulations in United States, and concerns...

<p>Theranos, the biotech company started by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, has another hurdle to cross in its whole "we're totally a legit blood-testing company" campaign. This time, it turns out that tens of thousands of blood tests were voided, making them totally invalid. Whoops!</p>

We haven't really written much about the insane Theranos scandal, though we discussed it on our podcast. The whole story is pretty crazy -- involving a heavily hyped up company that appeared to basically be flat out lying to everyone about what it could do. The company still exists, but barely. The company's founder and CEO, who was plastered across magazine covers and compared frequently to Steve Jobs, has been banned from running a lab for two years, and the company is now facing a $140 million lawsuit from its biggest partner, Walgreens, who claims that Theranos repeatedly lied to...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

It's worth asking why Elizabeth Holmes is still leading the embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc. But there may be a good reason why she still is in charge, one that has little to do with the scandal-ridden company's performance to date. Forget what venture capitalist Tim Draper — one of the first to invest in the Palo Alto company — implied this week that Holmes is being attacked because she's a young, female entrepreneur. The simple fact is that Theranos has not been able to deliver on its technology from a commercial, scientific or regulatory standpoint, and that falls...

2016 has not been too kind to Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs wannabe in charge of fraudulent Theranos. She has thus far been banned for 2 years from operating labs, removed from hosting fundraisers for Hillary and lost her entire net worth. And now, the Wall Street Journal has published the "tell-all" story of the whistle-blower, 26 year old Tyler Shultz, who brought the the whole Theranos farce crashing down. It's a sordid tale complete with all the expected twists and turns of a Jason Bourne thriller including intimidation, coercion and private detectives. Tyler Shultz is the grandson of George Shultz,...

After working at Theranos Inc. for eight months, Tyler Shultz decided he had seen enough. On April 11, 2014, he emailed company founder Elizabeth Holmes to complain that Theranos had doctored research and ignored failed quality-control checks. The reply was withering. Ms. Holmes forwarded the email to Theranos President Sunny Balwani, who belittled Mr. Shultz’s grasp of basic mathematics and his knowledge of laboratory science, and then took a swipe at his relationship with George Shultz, the former secretary of state and a Theranos director. “The only reason I have taken so much time away from work to address this...

Embattled Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is a victim who has been "totally attacked," venture capitalist Tim Draper told CNBC on Tuesday. Holmes has been under fire since a series of reports by The Wall Street Journal suggested the blood-testing start-up's testing devices were flawed. "Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of maybe why the women are so frustrated. She is a woman entrepreneur who built a fabulous company, did great things for consumers and she got attacked," the founding partner of Draper Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson said in an interview with "Closing Bell." "This is a great entrepreneur who...

Theranos Inc. allegedly voided 11.3% of all blood-test reports that the Silicon Valley laboratory firm provided to customers of Walgreens stores through a yearslong partnership between the two companies, according to legal papers the drugstore chain filed Tuesday. Theranos, whose main lab failed an inspection by U.S. regulators earlier this year, told Walgreens in June that it subsequently voided 31,000 test reports provided to the chain’s customers, Walgreens said in the public version of a sealed lawsuit.

SAN FRANCISCO – Walgreens has filed a $140 million breach of contract suit against Theranos Inc., compounding the woes of the Silicon Valley-based medical device startup. The suit was filed under seal in Delaware federal court on Tuesday. It's not clear what exactly the Illinois-headquartered pharmacy chain is alleging, but the docket describes the case as a breach of contract suit with a demand of $140 million.

SAN FRANCISCO — Embattled biotech startup Theranos Inc. has promoted senior litigation counsel David Taylor to acting general counsel. Taylor's already got a full plate. "He's got a mess on his hands," said Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro partner Robert Carey in Phoenix, one of many lawyers suing the blood diagnostics company for alleged consumer fraud. Carey's suit is one of six similar, separate suits consolidated in the Northern District of California. Aside from that litigation surplus, Theranos is being investigated for investor and consumer fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice, respectively. The...

The widow of a scientist who killed himself in fear he was about to lose his job at troubled bio-tech start-up Theranos has told of the company's paranoid culture. Ian Gibbons, the head scientist at the blood test company, died after taking an overdose of painkillers in May 2013 within hours of being summoned for a meeting. According to his widow, Rochelle, he had found faults in machines the company claimed would 'change the world' by being able to diagnose diseases from a single pinprick of a patient's blood. Having recently been diagnosed with cancer, he stopped going to work...

Biotech seed giant also gives a downbeat forecast for its fiscal year, as quarterly loss widens ___ Monsanto Co. , buffeted by a slumping global farm economy, outlined plans to slash 12% of its workforce and restructure its business as it reported a larger quarterly loss. The biotechnology-seed maker plans to cut 2,600 jobs while “streamlining and reprioritizing” commercial and research efforts as it grapples with declining crop prices that have pinched incomes for farmers, its main customers. Monsanto projected earnings in its fiscal 2016 that fell below analysts’ expectations. The St. Louis company also Wednesday unveiled a new stock-buyback...

Pharma heavyweight Novartis has stepped in to help bankroll Berkeley, CA-based Caribou Biosciences, one of the upstart leaders in the race to develop the cutting-edge CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology. The pharma giant joined a group of backers that includes Fidelity Biosciences, Mission Bay Capital, and 5 Prime as well as company founder Jennifer Doudna, a key player among a small group of investigators which has spawned a lineup of closely watched biotechs.All together the group, which was also joined by an unnamed investor, provided $11 million in an A round to Caribou, which plans to use the cash to further...

Will organ transplants be coming from aborted babies? They will if Ganogen Inc., a California Company, has their way. And Planned Parenthood and Stem Express will likely be partners in that chain that provides organs for transplant taken from aborted babies. Ganogen’s vision to deal with the shortage of transplant organs is to the harvest organs from aborted fetuses and transfer them into animals to get them to grow large enough to use as a replacement organs for needy patients. Ganogen announced earlier this year that they were able to take a kidney from an aborted fetus and transplant it...

DARPA Wants to Create Synthetic Organisms to Terraform and Change the Atmosphere of Mars Biotech, Space, Synthetic Biology June 25, 2015 by Giulio Prisco 435SHARES TwitterLinkedinFacebook The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) believes that it's on the way to creating synthetic organisms capable of terraforming Mars into a planet that looks more like Earth, Motherboard reports.Speaking at a recent biotech conference hosted by DARPA, Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) said: For the first time, we have the technological toolkit to transform not just hostile places here on Earth, but to go into space not...

This week’s article for National Catholic Register explores the seismic upheaval that has been the bio tech revolution. We seem blind to the fact that we are living in the midst of the most astounding technological revolution the world has ever seen. Biotechnology is the umbrella term for all the advances we have made in medical know-how, and reproductive technology is the most socially revolutionary subdivision of biotechnology. To put it simply, we no longer approach the transmission of human life as a sacred mystery — but, rather, have reduced it to the status of a baby-making machine that we’ve learned how...

Genetically modified crops are not just those that have been selectively bred, but they have had their DNA modified in some way as to make them more pest resistant and produce better yields. In many cases genes from other plants or even bacteria have been added to the DNA of a specific plant.This process has caused great concern among some that question whether the plants with modified genes are safe for human consumption or if there may be any long-term effects from the continual eating of these plants. There have been numerous challenges to the use of genetically modified crops...