Pfizer Inc has made an agreed cash offer to buy Medivation Inc for about $14 billion or an eye-popping 5.8 times the average revenue that Medivation has forecast for 2016. Long gone are the days when one times revenue was considered a reasonable purchase price for an industrial company.
A Swedish start-up company that links patients with doctors via the internet has raised €6.1 million in seed funding from a syndicate led by Index Ventures and Stockholm-based Creandum AB. Berlin-based Project A Ventures GmbH also participated in the round.
Cambridge Innovation Capital Plc (CIC), which finances projects arising from the University of Cambridge as well as from area biotechs, has raised £75 million in new equity capital from existing and new institutional investors including Woodford Investment Management.
The corporate venture arms of three European pharmaceutical groups are principal investors in a US start-up company called Tioma Therapeutics Inc that is developing antibodies targeting CD47, a protein that is overexpressed on different tumour cells.
Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in collaboration with the Estonian Competence Centre on Health Technologies have developed a new gene expression analysis assay that will enable a wider use of blood samples in biomarker discovery and analysis.
Denmark-based Symphogen A/S, which is developing recombinant antibody mixtures for cancer, has promoted Martin Olin, the company’s chief financial officer, to the position of chief executive officer and member of the board of directors.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a lethal motor neurone disease that progressively paralyses patients, has many different genetic causes, according to studies coordinated by the University Medical Center of Utrecht, which has reported the discovery of two new ALS genes.
German scientists have clarified the way in which cancer cells spread from a primary tumour to distant parts of the body in a process called metastasis. It has been known for some time that cancer cells travel through the bloodstream to reach other locations, but how they escape from blood vessels has not been clear.
Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd is continuing plans to bring its antibiotic ceftobiprole to the US market, while tightening control over its early-stage portfolio. In a report on the first-half year on 15 August, it disclosed plans to drop a preclinical, inhaled antibiotic candidate after a data review.
After years of investing in a product for stroke that failed, and then relaunching its portfolio around anaesthesia, Paion AG now has its sights firmly set on the commercialisation of its lead product, remimazolam, in the US.