Roche is to advance its strategy for delivering personalised medicines with the acquisition of Flatiron Health Inc, a company with technology for analysing real-world data from cancer patients. Roche is to pay $1.9 billion for the 87.4% of the company it doesn’t already own.
Following the exercise of the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares, Pieris Pharmaceuticals Inc has raised a gross $50.6 million from its initial public offering on the US Nasdaq market. This is an increase of $6.6 million from the time of pricing.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is to provide $6.5 million to Novartis to support development of a preclinical compound that has potential to treat cryptosporidiosis, the second leading cause of infectious diarrhoea in children under two years of age.
An initial public share offering in the US for Pieris Pharmaceuticals Inc has been priced at $8 per share and is expected to raise $44 million. The Nasdaq IPO will enable the company, a developer of protein therapeutics, to advance its bispecific drug candidate targeting the tumour microenvironment.
Synpromics Ltd is bringing its technology for creating synthetic promoters into a partnership with a unit of University College London (UCL) in order to help researchers there develop gene therapies for blood-based disorders. The agreement was announced on 25 January.
A new Belgian company has been launched to develop therapies for cognitive disorders using intellectual property from UCB SA. The company has received Series A financing of €17 million from a syndicate of Belgian and international investors.
Foundry Innovation & Research 1 Ltd (FIRE1) has raised €40 million in a Series C financing round to advance development of a medical device that uses digital technology to remotely monitor the health of patients who have had heart failure.
A two-year old company targeting the market for synthetic biology has raised £9 million to advance a new gene synthesis platform. Evonetix Ltd of Cambridge UK has technology that enables the parallel synthesis of DNA on silicon arrays.
A new agreement for fighting cancer by targeting the tumour microenvironment has been announced by the AstraZeneca Plc unit MedImmune and Innate Pharma SA of France. The goal is to overcome some of the limitations of the current checkpoint inhibitors.
Sanofi SA has successfully wooed the board of Ablynx to agree to a merger that values the Belgian company at €3.9 billion, or 46 times its revenue for 2016. In early January, Ablynx rejected a €2.6 billion takeover bid from Novo Nordisk A/S.