In the wake of unexpectedly positive clinical results from a trial testing the folfirinox chemotherapy regimen in patients with pancreatic cancer, after surgery, Targovax ASA has decided to drop development of its therapeutic vaccine for this indication.
Emulate Inc, the developer of micro-engineered chips that mimic that activity of live human organs, has raised $36 million in a Series C financing round to finance the expansion of its organs-on-chips technology that is being used by the pharma industry to test candidate drugs for safety and predict efficacy.
Roche and Foundation Medicine Inc reached a definitive merger agreement on 19 June enabling the Swiss multinational to acquire shares of the US molecular information company that it does not already own.
Roche is to buy the shares at $137 per share in cash giving a total transaction value of $2.4 billion and a total company value of $5.3 billion. This represents a premium of 29% to Foundation Medicine’s closing stock market price on 18 June and a premium of 47% and 68% to the 30-day and 90-day volume weighted average share price on the same day.
Syncona Investment Management Ltd of the UK has launched two new gene therapy companies to complement its existing portfolio which includes Nightstar Therapeutics Plc and Freeline Therapeutics Ltd.
The new companies, in which Syncona is the sole institutional investor, are Orbit BioMedical Ltd, a surgical platform company and SwanBio Therapeutics Ltd, a gene therapy company focused on neurological disorders. Syncona, formerly part of the Wellcome Trust, has invested $12 million in Orbit for an 80% stake, and $23 million in SwanBio for a 72% stake.
A gene therapy for a rare, genetic eye disorder has been selected by the US Food and Drug Administration for its Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Designation in recognition of the product’s potential to treat an unmet medical need.
The European Medicines Agency is restricting the use of two checkpoint inhibitor drugs as first-line treatments for urothelial cancer, or cancer of the bladder and urinary tract, because they may not work as well as chemotherapy in this group of patients. The drugs are Keytruda (pembrolizumab), the programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) inhibitor, and Tecentriq (atezolizumab), which inhibits the protein programmed cell death-ligand 1 (PD-L1). Both drugs are monoclonal antibodies that block a protective mechanism of cancer cells, allowing the immune system to destroy these cells.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved the marketing of an artificial intelligence algorithm which is part of a diagnostic intended to help physicians detect wrist fractures. Called OsteoDetect, the product is a computer-aided detection and diagnostic software package that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyse two-dimensional X-ray images for signs of distal radius fracture, a common type of wrist fracture. The software marks the location of the fracture on the image to assist the healthcare provider with detection and diagnosis.
Two Phase 3 trials of the candidate Alzheimer’s drug lanabecestat have been stopped for futility, Eli Lilly and Company and AstraZeneca Plc announced on 12 June. Lanabecestat is an inhibitor of the beta secretase cleaving enzyme (BACE), which plays a role in the production of the amyloid beta protein. The accumulation of this protein in the brain is believed to be a major cause of Alzheimer’s disease.
A short 18 months after its launch as a new company, Microbiotica Ltd has entered into a multi-year collaboration with Genentech, a member of the Roche group, to discover, develop and commercialise biomarkers, targets and medicines for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Microbiotica was spun out of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in 2016 to research the human microbiome, a term used to describe the genomes of microorganisms in the gut, including at least 1,000 species of bacteria.
Hookipa Biotech AG has signed a licencing deal with Gilead Sciences Inc giving the US company exclusive rights to its technology platform to develop vaccines targeting the hepatitis B and the human immunodeficiency viruses. The agreement brings Austria-based Hookipa into a closer alliance with Gilead which invested an undisclosed amount of money in Hookipa’s €50 million Series C investment round in December 2017.