News

Artios Pharma Ltd, which is building a portfolio of small molecule drugs designed to kill cancer cells by blocking their ability to repair damaged DNA, has raised $153 million in a Series C financing round. The company is preparing to take a compound targeting DNA polymerase theta (Pol theta) into clinical development before the end of the year. Pol theta is an enzyme that plays a role in the proliferation of certain cancer cells but which is not necessary for normal cell growth.

Sales of diagnostics, including new tools for identifying Covid-19, showed a double-digit increase at Roche in the first half year. By comparison, the turnover for pharmaceuticals fell, led by declines for the Avastin and Herceptin cancer medicines which are facing competition from less expensive biosimilars. Altogether, group sales were CHF 30.7 billion for the first six months, up by 5% from a year earlier. Pharmaceuticals generated CHF 21.7 billion, down by 7%, while diagnostics had sales of CHF 9 billion, up by 49%.

Novartis reported a 14% increase in group sales in the second quarter on the strength of its innovative medicines division and a rebound at the Sandoz generics unit. Sandoz had experienced weak retail demand and price competition at the start of the year, but the business was starting to stabilise as the second quarter drew to a close, the company said in its half-year review on 21 July.

GHO Capital Partners LLP, a specialist healthcare investor located in London, UK, has closed its third fund, raising more than €2 billion in capital for investment. The company invests broadly, providing money to enterprises in the medical device and technology sectors, biopharmaceutical enterprises, and companies delivering services to patients.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc plans to build a new life science cluster in the UK in order to bring more resources to bear on the development of new medicines. The cluster will be located at a site in Stevenage already owned by the company. GSK plans to sell 33 acres of the plot in order to unlock £400 million in new investment from a private sector developer and build a new campus. The cluster is expected to create up to 5,000 new jobs over the next five to 10 years.

Sanofi SA has stepped up its investment in messenger RNA (mRNA) with plans to create a new unit devoted exclusively to the technology in Cambridge, Mass, US, and Marcy l’Etoile, Lyon, France. On 29 June, the company announced plans to spend €400 million per year to accelerate the research and development of mRNA vaccines against a broad group of infectious diseases.

A UK company with technology for delivering peptides to the cytosol of cells, has raised £6.2 million in seed financing to investigate the application of its technology across a range of therapies. The financing was co-led by incoming investor Octopus Ventures and existing investor M Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Merck KGaA. NanoSyrinx was founded in 2020 by Joseph Healey, Nicholas Waterfield and Alexia Hapeshi to commercialise research conducted at the University of Warwick’s Medical School.

MorphoSys AG has increased its share capital with the issue of 1,337,552 new ordinary shares to a subsidiary of Royalty Pharma Plc as part of a long-term financial partnership that is enabling the German company to acquire Constellation Pharmaceuticals Inc of the US. The share deal will generate $100 million for MorphoSys and give Royalty Pharma Investments 3.9% of the German company’s registered share capital. MorphoSys completed the acquisition of Constellation on 15 July, giving it one of the first US companies to develop drugs in the field of epigenetics.

The European Medicines Agency has given a positive scientific review to a new treatment for achondroplasia, a condition that impairs bone growth and causes dwarfism. It is recommending that a marketing authorisation be issued to BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc, the developer, for use of Voxzogo (vosoritide) in patients two years and older whose epiphyses, or growth plates of the bones, are not yet closed. This condition must be confirmed by genetic testing. The medicine was evaluated in 121 patients with achondroplasia between the ages of five and 18 years.

Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, has asked federal officials to conduct an investigation of interactions between agency staff and executives at Biogen Inc in the process that led up to the FDA’s approval of Aduhelm (aducanumab) for Alzheimer’s disease on 7 June. A letter was sent to the acting inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services on 9 July and distributed globally on the same day on Twitter.