The UK government has enlisted the services of Illumina Inc and a number of public bodies to launch a project aimed at sequencing the genomes of up to 100,000 patients with cancer or a rare disease in order to discover new ways of treating the disorders.
A division of the US National Institutes of Health is to support the creation of a new database that will enable the study of the interaction of more than 1,400 Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs and drug-like compounds with more than 30 epigenetic enzymes.
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.
A spin-out from a German government-funded incubator has produced technology for potentially delivering drugs across the blood-brain barrier. The spin-out, Neuway Pharma GmbH, has now received €2.7 million in an A financing round led by Wellington Partners.
A new paradigm for testing experimental medicines is being launched in the UK under the leadership of Cancer Research UK and with the participation of AstraZeneca Plc, Pfizer Inc and the National Health Service (NHS). The project involves testing up to 14 experimental medicines in patients with late-stage non-small cell lung cancer who have been ‘stratified’ according to the genetic characteristics of their disease.
In keeping with its role in mapping the human genome more than a decade ago, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is helping organise another large data project – this time with the goal of identifying protein targets for new drugs. Together with the European Bioinformatics Institute and GlaxoSmithKline Plc, the Trust is setting up a new Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation in the UK to collect data relevant to disease.
AstraZeneca Plc has agreed to give the Medical Research Council access to its proprietary compound library under a collaboration aimed at identifying promising new candidate drugs. Under the deal, the MRC will fund up to 15 screening projects per year.
A study funded by the Wellcome Trust in the UK has identified a biomarker for depression, the first such biological indicator for the disease. Until now depression has mainly been diagnosed through clinical interviews, a process that can be very subjective.
Researchers from the US and Japan have described how somatic cells can be transformed into an embryonic state by the application of external stimuli. The technique, reported in Nature, does not involve an embryo or genetic reprogramming.
Janssen Research and Development LLC is to allow healthcare professionals and researchers access to anonymised data from its clinical trials, under an agreement negotiated with the Yale School of Medicine in the US.