The Roche group is set to broaden its antibody technology holdings with the acquisition of the privately-owned Austrian company Dutalys GmbH which has a new bispecific antibody platform. The deal is valued at up to $489 million including milestones.
Merck & Co Inc has bolstered its oncology portfolio with the acquisition of the privately-held Swiss biotechnology company OncoEthix SA which has a BET bromodomain inhibitor in Phase 1b for the treatment of haematological malignancies and advanced solid tumours.
The UK antibody developer Kymab Ltd is to lead a consortium of public institutions with expertise in public health to discover a new treatment for infection from the Ebola virus which is spreading through west Africa. The goal is to produce an antibody-based medicine.
Seven experimental medicines intended to treat patients infected by the Ebola virus are not yet ready for authorisation, largely because there is insufficient information about their safety and effectiveness, according to the European Medicines Agency.
Geneva-headquartered Index Ventures has invested £2 million in Stealthyx Therapeutics Ltd, a small British company that has developed an encapsulation technology for delivering biologics to the site of a disease. Stealthyx is a spin-out of Queen Mary, University of London.
There have been further management changes at Zealand Pharma A/S, the Denmark-based developer of peptide medicines, with news that the company’s chief business officer Arvind Hundal has stepped down. This follows the appointment of a new CEO effective 15 January 2015.
BerGenBio AS, a privately held platform company which is developing products that interfere with cancer metastasis, has raised NOK 90 million (€9.75 million) in equity financing to further develop its pipeline of early-stage therapies.
The Novartis cancer drug Afinitor (everolimus) has failed to show statistical significance in a group of patients with HER2 positive advanced breast cancer. The Phase 3 trial was investigating the drug as a first-line treatment in combination with trastuzumab and paclitaxel.
Pfizer Inc is prepared to commit up to $280 million to an experimental gene therapy for haemophilia which is under development by Spark Therapeutics in the US, while at the same time reinforcing its gene therapy research capacity in the UK.
Two European companies with complementary technology platforms have joined forces to supply drug targeting services to Forma Therapeutics Inc, a US company working to discover new compounds to treat cancer and other genetically-driven diseases.