News

Oxford BioMedica Plc said that it has reached the first development milestone in its collaboration with Sanofi-Aventis to produce a cancer immunotherapy product, leading to a payment of €9 million. The product, TroVax, targets the tumour antigen 5T4 which appears in a wide range of solid tumours.

Evotec AG has reached an agreement to acquire Renovis Inc of San Francisco, California, in an all stock transaction valued at about $151.8 million

A committee of the European Medicine Agency has recommended that 17 new products qualify for financial and regulatory incentives because they meet the European criteria for orphan medicines. Orphan products are intended to treat serious or life-threatening diseases that affect not more than 5 out of 10,000 persons in the European Union. Producers of orphan designated drugs may be eligible for grants and regulatory fee reductions.

IDEA AG, a privately held German biopharmaceutical company, has licensed its non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drug and delivery product, Diractin, to Alpharma Ireland Ltd, an affiliate of Alpharma Inc., a US specialty pharmaceutical company.

Vernalis Plc has received a milestone payment of $1.5 million from Novartis in connection with the start of a Phase 1 clinical trial of a compound to treat cancer. The payment stems from a 2004 research collaboration between Vernalis and the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research under which Novartis agreed to fund research into a number of candidate inhibitors of a protein that plays an important role in the proliferation of cancer cells.

Scientists should be allowed to create hybrid embryos, combining some human and some animal material, in order to try and derive a new source of embryonic stem cells for research, according to the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).

The European Medicines Agency has taken the first step towards implementing new European-wide procedures for testing medicines in children.

DSM Venturing BV, the venture capital arm of Royal DSM NV of the Netherlands, has made a €2 million equity investment in Jurilab Oy, in what Jurilab’s chief executive, Kari Paukkeri, describes as a “strategic alignment.”

German government institutions and private biotech companies are setting up a screening network that is intended to help medical researchers at universities translate their work into potential therapies.

Acambis Plc said its smallpox vaccine, ACAM2000, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for active immunisation of persons determined to be at high risk of smallpox infection.