Shire Plc generated enough cash flow from product sales in 2017 to reduce its non-GAAP debt by $3.4 billion thereby meeting its target of bringing borrowings down to a level of three times earnings. The company also confirmed plans to create separate neuroscience and rare disease business units.
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.
The US Food and Drug Administration has used a novel endpoint to approve a new drug for prostate cancer. Measuring metastasis-free survival, the agency decided that the Janssen Pharmaceutical drug Erleada (apalutamide) is effective.
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.
Novo Nordisk A/S, a global producer of diabetes products, reported little change in its sales and a 1% increase in operating profit in 2017 at respectively DKK 112 billion (€15.05 billion) and DKK 49 billion.
ViiV Healthcare Ltd, the specialist HIV company majority-owned by GlaxoSmithKline Plc, has filed a patent infringement suit against Gilead Sciences Inc over bictegravir, an integrase inhibitor that is part of a combination therapy approved in the US on 7 February.
An experimental cancer therapy that combines the Roche checkpoint antibody Tecentriq (atezolizumab) and Avastin (bevacizumab) met its co-primary endpoint of progression-free survival in a Phase 3 trial of patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma.
Sanofi SA is forecasting a rise in adjusted earnings per share in 2018 of between 2% and 5% as new products gradually overtake the decline in sales of its core diabetes franchise.