A syndicate of investors co-led by New Science Ventures LLC of the US is to provide €8 million to Ovizio Imaging Systems, a Belgium-based medical device company that has technology for the real-time three dimensional imaging of living cells.
Guido Rasi has been appointed to a new five-year term as executive director of the European Medicines Agency following a fresh recruitment process. Prof Rasi had been forced to step down a year ago in the wake of a procedural challenge to his earlier appointment.
A new lung cancer drug developed by AstraZeneca Plc and a diagnostic developed by Roche have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to identify and treat patients with non-small cell lung cancer whose tumours have a specific gene mutation.
The US Food and Drug Administration has expanded the approved uses for Harvoni (ledipasvir and sofosbuvir), a combination pill for chronic hepatitis C (HCV), to include patients co-infected with HIV as well as those with genotype 4, 5 and 6 infections.
Germany-based Curetis BV has raised €40 million in an initial public offering of its shares on the Euronext exchanges in Amsterdam and Brussels for the commercialisation of its molecular diagnostic system for serious infectious diseases.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a new combination therapy for advanced melanoma and has advised physicians to test for certain genetic mutations before prescribing the drugs. Both treatments are marketed by Genentech (Roche).
Evotec AG, which combines proprietary drug research and development with a service business, raised its revenue forecast for all of 2015, the second upward revision since the start of the year.
Germany-based Probiodrug AG has increased its share capital by 10% or €13.5 million in order to finance further development of its treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. The private share placement follows an initial public offering of the company’s shares in late 2014 that raised €23.2 million.
NightstaRx Ltd, a 2014 spinout from the University of Oxford, has raised $35 million in a Series B financing round to further develop a candidate gene therapy for choroideremia, an inherited form of progressive blindness.
It is now widely believed that people who are carriers of a gene called apolipoprotein E are at a greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease than those who do not. This does not mean that all carriers of the gene will develop the disease. But the risk is there, which is why an increasing number of companies are focusing their attention on this patient population to find out whether a pharmaceutical intervention could make a difference to their lives.