News

GW Pharmaceuticals Plc said it intends to issue $225 million worth of its shares on the US Nasdaq market subject to market conditions and investor appetite.

GW Pharmaceutical Plc, which is developing cannabinoid medicines for epilepsy and other diseases of the central nervous system, reported a 20.1% decline in revenue to £8.2 million for the fiscal year ended 30 September 2017, while its operating loss soared by more than 70% to £153.3 million. 

Semma Therapeutics Inc, a company founded by the Harvard University Professor Douglas Melton, has raised $114 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing round to bring a stem cell therapy for Type1 diabetes into the clinic.

MorphoSys AG has increased its financial guidance for 2017 in the wake of a licensing deal with I-Mab Biopharma, a biologics company based in Shanghai, China. The agreement gives I-Mab the right to develop the German company’s antibody for multiple myeloma for the Chinese market.

Siemens AG plans to list its healthcare imaging and diagnostics business, Siemens Healthineers, on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange during the first half of 2018, Europe’s largest industrial manufacturing company said on 29 November.

AstraZeneca Plc has entered into a partnership with the Chinese-government backed Future Industry Investment Fund (FIIF) to create a stand-alone, joint venture company called Dizal Pharmaceutical that will develop and commercialise new medicines in China.

Avelumab, a checkpoint antibody that is the mainstay of Merck KGaA’s immuno-oncology portfolio, has failed to show superior overall survival in patients with metastatic gastric cancer compared with chemotherapy. The data is from a Phase 3 trial called Javelin Gastric 300.

Normally, DNA coding is too big to be placed inside a cell. However researchers at ETH Zürich have developed a way of compressing DNA for delivery into a cell after which it is decompressed into its original state. They say the technique could assist the development of new medicines.

Scientists at the University of Tampere in Finland and the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have tested a vaccine targeting a pathogenic strain of an enterovirus in mice and found that it protected against Type 1 diabetes. The findings were reported in the 20 November 2017 edition of Diabetologia.

An immuno-oncology combination that had initially produced an objective response in a Phase 1/2 trial of patients with head and neck cancer, failed to show benefit in an extended patient population, Innate Pharma SA announced on 22 November.