Aleva Neurotherapeutics SA, a Swiss company with a candidate device for deep brain stimulation, has obtained $18 million in Series C financing enabling it to prepare for the registration of its product in Europe in 2017.
The shareholders of Shire Plc have voted to approve management’s proposed merger with Baxalta Inc to create a global company focused on developing drugs for rare diseases and other specialised conditions. The $32 billion deal comprises cash and shares.
Angle Plc, a specialist medical technology company listed on the AIM market in London, has placed about 15.8 million new shares with institutional investors raising £10.2 million in order to commercialise a liquid biopsy test for cancer based on the detection of circulating tumour cells.
MorphoSys AG has joined forces with the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas to discover and develop potential antibody therapies against cancer. The German company will use its technology platform to generate antibodies against jointly selected targets.
The Roche Group subsidiary Genentech has extended a discovery alliance with Evotec AG that began in May 2010 for another three years to 2019 in order to continue work in identifying new small molecule drugs against targets identified by Genentech. Financial details were not disclosed.
Netherlands-based oncology developer Merus has raised $55 million in an initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq market, less than originally planned. Life Sciences Partners, the company’s venture capital backer, said the sums were raised in “challenging market conditions.”
Paris-based Neovacs SA and Boston-based Stellar Biotechnologies Inc have agreed to form a new company, Neostell SAS, to manufacture and sell conjugated vaccines to third parties worldwide as well as to support Neovacs’ proprietary therapeutic vaccine pipeline.
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.