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Heather McKenzie

Heather McKenzie

Senior Editor

Heather McKenzie is a professional journalist with more than five years experience in the biopharmaceutical industry. Since joining BioSpace, she has written more than 200 features and breaking news articles with a particular focus in neuroscience and gene therapy. She has also traveled internationally to cover global biotech hubs such as Israel. In previous roles, she has covered current affairs, sports, education and politics. She previously spent eight years as a senior content producer for executive-level business conferences in the pharma/biotech, legal, energy and business strategy sectors. In her free time, Heather enjoys creative writing, spending time with family and playing with her energetic Russian Blue cat Roofus. She hails from Toronto and has also lived in Chicago and Chesapeake, Virginia. You can reach her at heather.mckenzie@biospace.com.

Drug Development
Can You Reuse KN95 Mask? All You Need To Know to Venture Out Safely
The main concern remains the KN95 mask’s regulation and lack of standardization. Also, to know if you can reuse KN95 mask or not, follow this article.
April 14, 2021
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5 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Policy
The Ebola Vaccine: A Cautionary Tale
The story of how the Ervebo came to be is not just an account of a broken contract, but also a cautionary tale.
April 8, 2021
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5 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Drug Development
COVID-19 Long Haulers: Real-Time Research Clarifying the Condition
The landscape may begin to become clearer as real-time research continues to emerge about the long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.
April 7, 2021
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4 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Genetown
GenomeFrontier, Ziopharm Non-Viral Vectors Could Transform CAR-T Cell Therapy
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T) therapy is one of the biggest cancer therapy breakthroughs of our time, but as with any precise science, there is still some fine-tuning to be done to overcome safety risks, limited payload capacity, and the prohibitive cost of manufacturing.
April 5, 2021
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5 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Courtesy of Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Drug Development
AbbVie Receives NDA for Atogepant, Aims to Stop Migraines in Their Tracks
AbbVie won the NDA on the strength of definitive results in a Phase III ADVANCE trial, where atogepant met all six secondary endpoints at the 30-60 mg dose range, proving statistically significant in heading off migraines in nearly 2500 adult participants who experience them between 4-14 days per month.
March 30, 2021
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2 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Drug Development
ALS Patients Fight for the Right to Try and Patient-Centric Trial Design
Lisa Stockman Mauriello was diagnosed with ALS in January and is seeking access to Biogen’s tofersen (BIIB067) through the Right to Try Act. Her case has reinvigorated the ALS community and its fight for expanded access to investigational therapies for this cruel, always fatal disease.
March 30, 2021
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7 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Business
Swift Fall From Grace Continues for Former COVID-19 Vaccine Czar Slaoui
In a stunning fall from grace playing out this week, former Operation Warp Speed vaccine czar, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, issued a statement Thursday morning, as news emerged that he has resigned from additional biotech posts.
March 25, 2021
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2 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Biotech Beach
Achieving Gender Equality in The Life Sciences Industry Will Take a ‘Village’
Per BioSpace’s 2020 U.S. Life Sciences Salary Report and 2020 U.S. Life Sciences Diversity & Inclusion Report, men out-earn women by 19.3%, which climbs to 47.6% when looking specifically at health care. Also, only 14% of women felt that opportunities for promotion were fair compared to 23% of their male counterparts.
March 22, 2021
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6 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Drug Development
ICYMI: A Closer Look at News You Might Have Missed This Week
The results published in the NEJM state that pegcetacoplan met the study’s primary endpoint for efficacy, demonstrating an advantage over eculizumab with a statistically significant improvement in adjusted means of 3.8 g/dL of hemoglobin at week 16 (p<0.001). An impressive 85% of patients were transfusion free at 16 weeks, in contrast to only 15% of eculizumab-treated patients.
March 18, 2021
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7 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Business
AMR Fund and Global Cohorts Working to Prevent Another Pandemic
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 35,000 Americans perish each year from antibiotic-resistant infections, and estimates have AMR claiming the lives of as many as 10 million globally by 2050.
March 11, 2021
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7 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Business
Takeda Inks Deal to Go After Solid Tumors with Maverick T-Cell Engager Technology
The pair’s lead candidate, TAK-186 (formerly MVC-101), a first-in-class conditionally active T-cell engager, has recently entered the clinic in a Phase I/II study for the treatment of EGFR-expressing solid tumors such as those found in head and neck cancers.
March 9, 2021
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3 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Business
Promoting Diversity & Inclusion Through an Ethos of Cultural and Emotional Intelligence
Despite a historic push for greater diversity and inclusion (D&I), a significant disconnect prevails between good intentions and actual lived experiences.
March 9, 2021
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6 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Business
Are Bionauts™ a Vessel to the Final Frontier of CNS Diseases?
Bionauts™, a novel treatment modality that uses remote-controlled microscale robots to deliver biologics, nucleic acids, or small molecule therapies to precise areas of the brain, has the potential to go where no therapy has gone before, opening up new pathways in the fight against devastating CNS disorders like gliomas and Huntington’s disease.
March 3, 2021
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3 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Drs. Neely Mozaffarian and Hong Sun, Janssen Immun
Drug Development
Pivots During Pandemic Bring Patient-Centric Options to Rare Disease Patients
To facilitate its goal of building an industry-leading gene therapy company focused on rare CNS diseases, Sio has made it a priority to interact with patient organizations to determine their primary objective, whether that be stability or a cure.
February 28, 2021
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7 min read
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Heather McKenzie
Orna Chief Executive Officer, Thomas Barnes.
Business
Orna Therapeutics Circles Success With $100 Million Launch
Orna, which began as an academic query at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a biotechnology company creating fully engineered circular RNA, or O-shaped RNA therapies for the treatment of cancer, autoimmune, and genetic disorders.
February 24, 2021
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3 min read
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Heather McKenzie
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