Most clin­i­cal tri­als for Hunt­ing­ton’s dis­ease have run aground in the last few years, but aca­d­e­m­ic re­searchers haven’t been dis­suad­ed from try­ing to shift how the rare ge­net­ic dis­or­der is un­der­stood.

A hand­ful of pa­pers re­leased in the last 12 months sug­gest those shifts are com­ing soon­er rather than lat­er. The lat­est sci­en­tif­ic study, pub­lished in Cell on Thurs­day, comes from re­searchers at the Broad In­sti­tute of MIT and Har­vard. They claim pre­vi­ous re­search may have been look­ing at the dis­ease the wrong way and of­fer a po­ten­tial new frame­work for treat­ments.

Led by Steve Mc­Car­roll and Sabi­na Berret­ta, the group looked at post­mortem brain tis­sue of Hunt­ing­ton’s pa­tients and com­pared it to tis­sue from in­di­vid­u­als with­out Hunt­ing­ton’s, aim­ing to see how a spe­cif­ic DNA mu­ta­tion in­flu­ences the dis­ease’s pathol­o­gy. They as­sert, con­trary to ear­ly as­sump­tions, that Hunt­ing­ton’s pa­tients don’t slow­ly de­te­ri­o­rate.

US reg­u­la­tors have re­ject­ed a T cell ther­a­py for a rare and se­ri­ous trans­plant com­pli­ca­tion re­lat­ed to Ep­stein-Barr virus from Atara Bio­ther­a­peu­tics and Pierre Fab­re.

The ther­a­py, known as tab­ele­cleu­cel or tab-cel, was turned away af­ter the FDA in­spect­ed a third-par­ty man­u­fac­tur­ing site, Atara said in a Thurs­day press re­lease. FDA's re­jec­tion let­ter "did not iden­ti­fy any de­fi­cien­cies" re­lat­ed to the man­u­fac­tur­ing of the ther­a­py it­self, nor any con­cerns over ef­fi­ca­cy or safe­ty da­ta, Atara said. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, it will not be re­quired to run an­oth­er clin­i­cal tri­al.

Atara's stock price ATRA fell more than 45% on Thurs­day morn­ing.

Vac­cine tech com­pa­ny Mi­cron Bio­med­ical has start­ed 2025 on a pos­i­tive note, rais­ing over $16 mil­lion in a Se­ries A ex­ten­sion round.

The fund­ing will be used to man­u­fac­ture its vac­cine “but­ton” tech­nol­o­gy as it gears up for a po­ten­tial com­mer­cial launch in 2027, CEO Steve Da­mon told End­points News. The com­pa­ny’s tech is a small coin-sized but­ton con­tain­