Caught in the cen­ter of a boil­ing con­tro­ver­sy over ac­cu­sa­tions of sex­u­al ha­rass­ment lev­eled against their chief sci­en­tif­ic of­fi­cer, Aubrey de Grey, the board of di­rec­tors of the SENS Re­search Foun­da­tion moved to fire the promi­nent an­ti-ag­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tor over the week­end af­ter they learned that he had in­di­rect­ly at­tempt­ed to ap­ply “pres­sure on one of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion’s par­tic­i­pants.”

De Grey al­most im­me­di­ate­ly fired back on his Face­book page, say­ing he had reached out to one of the ac­cusers — Ce­line Halioua — through a mu­tu­al friend in or­der to en­cour­age her to di­vulge in­for­ma­tion in her pos­ses­sion “iden­ti­fy­ing the true guilty par­ty/par­ties” so that she wouldn’t ap­pear to be hin­der­ing the in­ves­ti­ga­tion by pro­tect­ing that (uniden­ti­fied) per­son.

He goes on to say that he’s been com­plete­ly ex­on­er­at­ed by the orig­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion and is in a po­si­tion to start a new foun­da­tion with loy­al al­lies but in­tends to fight it out un­til he is cleared of the charges and re­gains con­trol of the group.

This lat­est move un­der­scores a se­ries of events this year that have put the is­sue of sex­u­al ha­rass­ment in the re­search com­mu­ni­ty at cen­ter stage for the in­dus­try, rang­ing from the dis­missal of promi­nent sci­en­tist Mon­cef Slaoui from any re­main­ing ties with GSK to the fir­ing of David Saba­ti­ni this week­end fol­low­ing a sex­u­al ha­rass­ment probe at the pres­ti­gious White­head In­sti­tute at MIT.

The sim­mer­ing con­tro­ver­sy at SENS start­ed more than a week ago af­ter Halioua and Lau­ra Dem­ing post­ed their ac­cu­sa­tions on­line, out­lin­ing what they said were in­ap­pro­pri­ate and ha­rass­ing com­ments by de Grey and an­oth­er ex­ec­u­tive at the foun­da­tion and a “sex­u­al un­der­cur­rent” that per­me­at­ed SENS.

When she was 17, as End­points News’ Nicole De­Feud­is and Max Gel­man first re­port­ed, Dem­ing says de Grey “sent her an in­ap­pro­pri­ate email from his work ad­dress, in which he de­tailed his ‘ad­ven­tur­ous love life,’ and ad­mit­ted he had con­sid­ered let­ting their con­ver­sa­tions ‘stray in that di­rec­tion.'”

We al­so re­port­ed:

Halioua says she was a SENS-fund­ed stu­dent when de Grey made sex­u­al re­marks to her at a din­ner with SENS ex­ec­u­tives and donors. She said de Grey ‘fun­neled me al­co­hol and hit on me the en­tire night,’ and told her she had a ‘re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to have sex with the SENS donors in at­ten­dance so they would give mon­ey to him.’

SENS re­spond­ed that it had placed de Grey on leave weeks ago and was con­duct­ing an in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the ac­cu­sa­tions.

Late Sat­ur­day the board post­ed an up­date on Twit­ter:

State­ment from the SENS Re­search Foun­da­tion Board of Di­rec­tors pic.twit­ter.com/zhKOLE­wA­JD

— SENS Foun­da­tion (@senst­weet) Au­gust 22, 2021

As for de Grey, he goes in­to a some­what con­vo­lut­ed and not en­tire­ly clear state­ment on his Face­book page on what had hap­pened to force this lat­est turn of events. The state­ment in­cludes:

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the in­de­pen­dent in­ves­ti­ga­tor (Sue Ann Van Dermy­den) has ap­par­ent­ly tak­en ex­cep­tion to my ac­tion, view­ing it as an at­tempt to in­flu­ence the in­ves­ti­ga­tion in my favour. I am dumb­found­ed by this, giv­en that my email con­sists sole­ly of an at­tempt to en­cour­age Ce­line to di­vulge in­for­ma­tion as op­posed to sup­press­ing it, and al­so that it be­gins with praise of Sue Ann (whom, in spite of this, I still view as a con­sum­mate pro­fes­sion­al and with whom I shall con­tin­ue to co­op­er­ate with­out reser­va­tion un­til her work is done). How­ev­er, giv­en her strong re­ac­tion, I un­der­stand the board’s view that they need­ed to act fast.The ques­tion, of course, is whether my email to the mu­tu­al friend was in fact like­ly, let alone in­tend­ed, to in­ter­fere with the in­ves­ti­ga­tion. Be­low is the en­tire text. De­cide for your­self. Re­mem­ber that my men­tion of the state of Ce­line’s ca­reer “as things stand” was writ­ten in the af­ter­math of the out­pour­ing of sup­port for me and con­dem­na­tion of her that fol­lowed my first Face­book post 24 hours pre­vi­ous­ly.Let me close by say­ing that I am in a per­fect­ly fine po­si­tion to start a new foun­da­tion right now, hir­ing my loy­al staff and pro­ceed­ing as if noth­ing had hap­pened, but that that is not my plan. I plan to get the truth known, my foun­da­tion back, and the bad ac­tors ex­cised from our com­mu­ni­ty. Mean­while, let’s just keep go­ing.

Text of the email that pre­cip­i­tat­ed to­day’s ac­tion:

Rght mate, if you care about your (and my, yes) friend Ce­line you will lis­ten up. There is a job you need to do that prob­a­bly on­ly you are in a po­si­tion to do, large­ly BE­CAUSE of your rush to judge­ment to­day that will have ce­ment­ed her trust in you. The six-week in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to Ce­line’s al­le­ga­tions against me has con­clud­ed. It was con­duct­ed by some­one named Sue Ann Van Dermy­den – look her up – good luck to any­one who tries to paint her as a white­wash­er. It has found not on­ly that those al­le­ga­tions are 100% fic­ti­tious, but al­so that Ce­line’s ac­count of them in her posts and her tes­ti­mo­ny to Sue Ann is re­plete with grave in­con­sis­ten­cies – AND, with fea­tures that clear­ly sug­gest she was fed false in­for­ma­tion by a SRF board mem­ber (which you will prob­a­bly al­so have in­ferred from my Face­book post last night, but then it was just me say­ing it).The con­se­quence (oth­er than my re­in­state­ment, ob­vi­ous­ly) is that a new in­ves­ti­ga­tion is be­ing launched, again by Sue Ann, but this time in­ves­ti­gat­ing SRF so as to iden­ti­fy the ac­tu­al vil­lain. The ex­is­tence of that new in­ves­ti­ga­tion is go­ing to be made pub­lic to­mor­row af­ter­noon – un­less, drum roll, it is ob­vi­at­ed/abort­ed by new in­for­ma­tion. I prob­a­bly don’t need to spell out any­thing more. Ce­line’s ca­reer is ab­solute­ly over as things stand, and the on­ly rea­son it ac­tu­al­ly isn’t is be­cause I am a man of ho­n­our who re­fus­es to let some­body (es­pe­cial­ly a me­te­oric ris­ing star) be burned at the stake while an ac­tu­al vil­lian gets away scot free and is there­by em­bold­ened. Yes she will have to take some lumps for be­ing so gullible, but that’s not such a big deal. BUT, what will com­plete­ly tor­pe­do my res­cu­ing of her is if she is seen to be re­sist­ing the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the ac­tu­al vil­lain. So now, as in to­mor­row (Thurs) morn­ing, is the time when Ce­line needs to find her mo­jo and spill the beans. As of now, a few peo­ple are in the frame as the cul­prit. Ce­line needs to name names, and fast, so that no one gets to know that this new in­ves­ti­ga­tion is hap­pen­ing as a di­rect con­se­quence of her in­sin­cer­i­ty to Sue Ann and the world.And you need to tell her so, as prob­a­bly on­ly you can. Go to it. Cheers A

Kunwoo Lee was a graduate student at UC-Berkeley when gene editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna — who happened to work in the same building where he studied — published a paper on CRISPR/Cas9. So he did what any aspiring bioengineer would do: He ran to her lab, and grabbed a postdoc there.

“We started really thinking about the future coming (for) gene therapy and gene editing,” he said.

Lee’s research with Doudna led him to co-found a small San Francisco-based biotech called GenEdit in 2016, the same year he graduated. After five quiet years, the team is now unveiling a $26 million Series A round with support from some big names like Eli Lilly to fund their work on one of the most pressing challenges in gene therapy: what Lee calls the “delivery problem.”

Bluebell Capital Partners, a proxy brawler fresh off a campaign to oust global food giant Danone’s CEO and most of its board of directors, has bought a stake in UK drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline with its eyes trained directly on Emma Walmsley, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

The London-based hedge fund joins another notorious activist firm in Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, which earlier this year called for a shakeup in leadership at GSK to handle what the company described as a wealth of riches across the drug giant’s portfolio hindered by limited vision from top staff.

When Thomas Braun was starting out as a young professor at Germany’s University of Würzburg in 1997, he decided to try his hand at a new field: heart regeneration, a sci-fi-esque premise that could offer a way to treat patients recovering from a heart attack. He thought it would take a few years before they got results.

“We were,” he acknowledges now, “rather naïve.”

But on Thursday, after two and a half decades of fitful starts and abandoned leads, Braun and a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute showed that they could reprogram heart cells in mice and get the animals to regenerate cardiac tissue after a heart attack. The breakthrough, published in Science, adds new evidence that it will eventually be possible to help patients recover muscle lost in heart attacks and gives another boon to anti-aging researchers who want to one day apply these rejuvenation techniques across much of the body.

In an attempt to get its house of accelerated approvals in order, the FDA is holding its second adcomm of 2021 to review cancer drugs that won accelerated approvals but failed to confirm clinical benefit in subsequent trials or have taken a long time to read those data out.

On Dec. 2, the FDA’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee will review two accelerated approvals from Secura Bio’s Farydak (panobinostat), a third-line multiple myeloma drug, and Acrotech Biopharma’s Marqibo, as a third-line drug for adult patients with Philadelphia chromosome negative acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Both drugs have been marketed for more than five years under their accelerated approvals but have recorded negligible sales in their respective indications in recent years.