The Swiss biopharmaceutical company, Actelion AG, will receive CHF 150 million (£66 million) up-front and up to CHF 3.15 billion in future milestone payments from GlaxoSmithKline as part of a co-development and co-commercialisation deal for Actelion’s treatment for primary insomnia, almorexant.
Roche AG has discontinued three HIV discovery programmes because it has determined that they were unlikely to yield products that would be sufficiently innovative compared with what is already on the market. The programmes include one non-nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI) and two CCR5s, one of which was a small molecule and the other an antibody. The NNRTi drug candidate was a small molecule.
Oxford BioMedica Plc has stopped administering vaccinations to patients in a Phase 3 trial of its lead cancer product, TroVax, after an independent data safety monitoring board declared that the study would not meet its primary endpoint of overall survival in renal cancer. The study will be completed in order to collect follow-up data on patients. But the trial data alone will not be sufficient to support an application for a marketing authorisation in renal cancer, the company said on 11 July 2008.
York Pharma Plc, a specialist dermatology company listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM), said it has purchased two wound-care products from Belgium’s Solvay Pharmaceuticals BV in a transaction that should enable York Pharma to become self-financing over a 12-month span but which involves expensive and dilutive financing arrangements.
Shire Plc, the British specialty pharmaceutical company, has made an agreed bid to acquire all of the Frankfurt-listed shares of Jerini Ag for €328 million. In a conference call on 3 July 2008, Shire’s chief executive, Angus Russell, said the acquisition will add Jerini’s hereditary angioedema (HAE) product, Firazyr (icatibant acetate), to its portfolio of drugs for symptomatic rare disorders administered by specialist physicians. Firazyr was given a positive opinion by the European Medicine Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use in April 2008 and is awaiting final approval by the European Commission.
A famine-breaking initial public offering (IPO) of the French diagnostic company, Ipsogen SA, has held up well despite the general weakness of stock markets.
The Edinburgh-based drug development company, Ardana Plc, has entered into voluntary administration after exhausting its cash reserves.
Pharmexa A/S, the Danish company that is developing cancer vaccines, has replaced its chief executive officer while announcing a further 40% staff reduction in addition to a 20% staff cut in February 2008.
Sygnis Pharma Ag said it expects its net loss to increase from €6.3 in the year ended March 2008 to €12 million in 2009 as it prepares for Phase 2b efficacy trials of AX200, its candidate for treating stroke.
The ReNeuron Group Plc disclosed that it is to made applications in three jurisdictions to start trials of its ground-breaking stem-cell therapy for stroke and that it expects to get approval in at least one of the jurisdictions for a first-in-man trial within six- to-nine months.