Ablynx NV has received a €2.1 million grant from a government body in the Flanders region of Belgium to investigate the treatment of eye diseases with the company’s antibody-derived therapeutics which go by the name of Nanobodies.
ArGEN-X NV has raised an additional €1.8 million from its initial public offering on the Euronext stock exchange in Brussels following the partial exercise of an over-allotment option by one of the underwriters.
Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd, which develops gene sequencing technology, said that it has raised £35 million in new funding through a private placement of its ordinary shares. The transaction brings to £180 million the total funds raised since its founding in 2005.
Scancell Holdings Plc said that a study in animals which combined its cancer vaccine SCIB1 with a checkpoint inhibitor showed enhanced tumour destruction and longer survival times, supporting the hypothesis that the best outcomes in humans may be from combination therapy.
Evotec has increased the scope of its discovery activities with an agreement to help Shire Plc identify potential drugs to treat Fabry’s disease, an inherited metabolic disorder. The agreement is one of several to be initialed in the first half of the year that collectively expand the company’s reach into metabolic disorders, cancer, pain and infectious disease.
Novo Nordisk A/S said that a cardiovascular outcomes study for one of its newest products, Tresiba, is proceeding ahead of schedule, raising the prospect that data could be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in the first half of 2015 with a new assessment thereafter. Tresiba was turned down by the FDA in 2013.
Scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have for the first time located single-letter changes in the DNA code of Streptococcus pneumoniae which enable the bacterium to evade treatment with antibiotics. The discovery was made using a genome-wide association study.
H. Lundbeck A/S has confirmed that revenue will decline this year because of generic competition for two legacy products and a tougher pricing environment for its products, which treat neurological disorders.
The German biotechnology company 4SC AG has expanded its research and development capacity in epigenetics with two deals focused on discovering epigenetic compounds in cancer and cardiovascular disease. The company gave the update in its half-year financial report.
A first human study of a monoclonal antibody targeting the toll-like receptor 4 for the potential treatment of rheumatoid arthritis has been shown to be safe and well tolerated, according to the developer Novimmune SA of Switzerland.