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Avacta Group Plc, which is developing a new type of protein therapeutic, is to license certain assets to Moderna Therapeutics Inc against a potential therapeutic target which has been part of an ongoing research collaboration between the two companies. In an announcement on 4 February, Avacta said that Moderna has exercised an option to the technology. As a result, it may receive undisclosed payments for reaching future clinical development milestones, as well as royalties on future product sales.

The UK contract research organisation Metrion Biosciences Ltd has entered into a collaboration with LifeArc (formerly Medical Research Council Technology) to discover new drugs in the field of neurology. The goal is to identify selective small molecule modulators of a specific ion channel target which gene association studies have identified as likely to be involved with neurological diseases.

Patent litigation involving two of Europe’s most important antibody companies plus Janssen Biotech formally ended on 31 January after the parties agreed to drop their mutual claims. The lawsuit was brought by MorphoSys AG against Genmab A/S and its partner Janssen relating to Darzalex (daratumumab), the latter companies’ marketed drug for multiple myeloma.

The pace of change accelerated at GlaxoSmithKline Plc in 2018 as the company redirected its therapeutic focus towards oncology and took the first steps towards spinning off its consumer products business into a separate company. Emma Walmsley, chief executive since April 2017, said in a teleconference on 6 February that the company’s key priority going forward is to “rebuild the pharmaceutical pipeline.”

GlaxoSmithKline Plc has entered into a cancer collaboration with Merck KGaA of Germany which features a direct challenge to Keytruda’s (pembrolizumab) dominant position in lung cancer. Announced on 5 February, the partnership involves the co-development and commercialisation of the Merck asset M7824 (bintrafusp alfa) which is an investigational bifunctional fusion protein immunotherapy.

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has launched a call for proposals from the scientific community to help it create a large chemogenomics library for drug discovery, access to which would be unrestricted.

The project is one of three announced on 22 January which will have a budget of more than €80 million. The other two projects are on obesity and the environmental impacts of medicines. The library project is directed at the wider academic community, many of whom do not have access to proprietary tool compounds collected by industry.

Novo Nordisk A/S reported flat sales and a decline in operating profit in 2018 as the impact of lower insulin prices in the US continued to weigh on the company’s financial results. But the outcome was better than the company’s own forecast, largely due to the strong performance of the glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) products Victoza and Ozempic for Type 2 diabetes and the obesity product Saxenda.

The Roche Group ended 2018 with sales of CHF 56.9 billion ($57.16 billion), up by 7% from a year earlier, and US regulatory approvals for two new cancer medicines as well as a drug for treating acute uncomplicated influenza. The company had an operating profit of CHF 14.8 billion, up by 13.5% from a year earlier.

Novartis initiated a major change in strategy in 2018 under the leadership of Vas Narasimhan, who became chief executive a year ago. The company sold its consumer products business and took steps to divest the Alcon eye division. At the same time it invested heavily in gene therapy and moved into radiopharmaceuticals.

The strategy change was mainly reflected in the company’s operating income for the year which fell by 5% to $8.2 billion due to restructuring and takeovers costs.

Sphere Fluidics Ltd has raised $2 million from investors to accelerate growth and support the sales of its single cell analysis system which is used to recognise biological targets and improve antibody discovery.

The funds were provided by Greenwood Way Capital, Oxford Technology and Innovations EIS Fund and 24Haymarket.

Sphere Fluidics is located in Babraham, Cambridgeshire, UK and Monmouth Junction, New Jersey, US.

The company announced the funding on 29 January 2019.

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