Company News

The UK cell-therapy company Adaptimmune Ltd has entered a collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline Plc to advance the development of an autologous T-cell receptor product for patients with a variety of cancers. 

Imperial Innovations Plc has announced plans to raise up £150 million by way of a private share placement with existing and new institutional investors in order to support the financing needs of its portfolio companies and to source new investment opportunities.

An experimental treatment combining the drug olaparib, which blocks DNA repair, with the blood vessel inhibitor cediranib showed a near doubling of progression-free survival in patients with ovarian cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

Roche said that results from a Phase 1 open-label study of its checkpoint inhibitor MPDL3280A shrank tumours in 43% of people with a specific type of metastatic bladder cancer. The data was disclosed at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago on 31 May.

Rodin Therapeutics Inc of the US has raised $12.9 million in Series A money from its founding investors in order to advance its pipeline of candidate drugs directed against epigenetic targets for neurological disorders. The company is based on German drug discovery technology.

ArGEN-X BV has secured a collaboration with Bayer AG to discover and develop candidate therapeutic antibodies directed at a number of targets across multiple therapeutic areas that, it says, are often intractable to existing antibody platforms.

Evotec AG has expanded its drug discovery services into the area of infectious disease with the acquisition of the UK contract research organisation Euprotec Ltd. Euprotec has a portfolio of assays that can be used to discover treatments for bacterial and fungal diseases.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc said that it has been informed by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office that the office has opened a formal criminal investigation into the group’s commercial practices.

There have always been regional discrepancies in the way capital markets operate. But only recently have the differences in the valuations of life science companies in the US and Europe been such a big topic for discussion. This was in full display at the 2014 BioTrinity meeting held in London on 12-14 May,

Pfizer Inc said it won’t pursue its nearly £70 billion bid for AstraZeneca Plc in light of the UK company’s rejection of its final offer on 19 May. The statement came just hours before the legal period for a final deal expired under UK takeover rules.