Legacy drugs accounted for half of pharmaceutical sales at Roche in 2017, but this was partially offset by strong growth for a group of recently launched products including new medicines for multiple sclerosis, haemophilia A and cancer.
A decades’ long discussion in the EU about how to establish common rules for assessing the value of new medicines has come to a conclusion with a proposal from the European Commission on 31 January to regulate health technology assessment (HTA).
Foundry Innovation & Research 1 Ltd (FIRE1) has raised €40 million in a Series C financing round to advance development of a medical device that uses digital technology to remotely monitor the health of patients who have had heart failure.
A two-year old company targeting the market for synthetic biology has raised £9 million to advance a new gene synthesis platform. Evonetix Ltd of Cambridge UK has technology that enables the parallel synthesis of DNA on silicon arrays.
A new agreement for fighting cancer by targeting the tumour microenvironment has been announced by the AstraZeneca Plc unit MedImmune and Innate Pharma SA of France. The goal is to overcome some of the limitations of the current checkpoint inhibitors.
Storm Therapeutics Ltd has recruited the Nobel Laureate Thomas Cech to its scientific advisory board as the company looks to develop small molecule modulators of RNA epigenetics. Storm was founded in 2015 and has raised £16 million in Series A financing.
Sanofi SA has successfully wooed the board of Ablynx to agree to a merger that values the Belgian company at €3.9 billion, or 46 times its revenue for 2016. In early January, Ablynx rejected a €2.6 billion takeover bid from Novo Nordisk A/S.
The European Medicines Agency is recommending approval of a new medicine for haemophilia A developed by Roche that is intended to prevent bleeding or reduce the frequency of bleeding episodes in patients who have developed resistance to existing medicines.
The first patient to be treated with a wireless sub-retinal implant designed to correct for damage caused by dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) has responded to the therapy, according to the developer Pixium Vision SA of France.
France-based Adocia SA has reported positive early results from a new formulation of existing diabetes medicines that is intended to act faster and last longer than the current standard of care.