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.
Innovation in the biopharmaceutical industry is increasingly being driven by partnership deals. The variety and structure of these deals were discussed in early December 2014 in Lille, France at BioFIT, an event organised by the French life science group AFSSI. Industry executives and technology transfer officers argued that partnerships are becoming more common, and in some cases, more open-ended.
Responding to the growing need for new antibiotics, Merck & Co Inc has reached an agreement to acquire Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc for $9.5 billion. Cubist’s pipeline has new treatments for both Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium difficile infections.