Finance, Grants, Deals

Novimmune SA, a Swiss antibody developer, has raised a second round of CHF 30 million ($31 million) from its existing shareholders after obtained the same amount from them in January.

The $9 billion agreed merger of Quintiles Transnational Holdings Inc and IMS Health Holdings Inc is the latest, and one of the most ambitious, attempts by industry to use advances in information technology to bring down the cost of drug development.

The France-based diagnostics company Novacyt SA is poised to complete the acquisition of Primerdesign Ltd of the UK giving it new technology for analysing DNA as well as a commercial presence in more than 100 countries.

Medherant Ltd, a spin out of the University of Warwick, has raised follow-on capital of £250,000 from the investment group Mercia Fund Management to continue development of a transparent adhesive patch that can deliver prolonged doses of a drug directly through the skin.

BTG Ltd, which supplies sophisticated equipment to the hospital market, is acquiring Galil Medical Inc, a vendor of cryoablation equipment for destroying diseased tissue by freezing it. The consideration will be $84.5 million in cash and future milestone and regulatory payments of up to $25.5 million. 

Ergomed Plc, a listed UK clinical-trial services organisation, is raising between £9 and £13 million with a share placement that will help finance the takeover of Haemostatix Ltd, which is developing products for inducing rapid blood clotting.

Wilson Therapeutics AB, a Swedish company owned by venture capital firms, is to make an initial public offering of its shares on Nasdaq Stockholm in order to take the company’s copper removal product for Wilson’s disease through Phase 3 and registration and to the market by 2020.

Bispecific, which is the term given to a molecule that binds to two different antigen, has largely been associated with therapeutic antibodies. But research has also been underway to discover whether the same concept can be applied to small molecules.

Galapagos NV and AbbVie Inc have raised the stakes in their bid to overtake Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc in cystic fibrosis with plans to start human trials in 2017 of a new triple combination therapy for the disease.

Sanofi SA is to team up with Recursion Pharmaceuticals LLC of the US to discover new uses for drugs in its clinical-stage portfolio that target rare diseases. The deal positions Sanofi to play a bigger role in treating rare diseases at a time when competition in the sector is increasing.