News

Novo Nordisk A/S’s comprehensive diabetes franchise continued to flourish in 2010 with sales of diabetes products rising by 21.9% to DKK 45,710 million (€6,132 million), the company announced.

Eli Lilly Company and Bristol-Myers Squibb have announced the stopping of enrollment in one of their two global Phase 3 studies of necitumumab, an investigational treatment for first-line advanced non-small cell lung cancer.

The European Union has allocated €3.3 million to a gene therapy consortium which is working on a possible treatment for acute intermittent porphyria (AIP), a metabolic disorder. A treatment has been developed by Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics (AMT).

Four research groups from the US and Europe have joined together in a collaboration to discover and map the genes that contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. The primary goal is to understand the role that inheritance plays in the disease.

Despite the many achievements of modern cancer therapies, one uncertainty continues to haunt the industry. This is knowing whether a patient who has apparently been treated successfully with chemotherapy or a targeted antibody therapy will nonetheless experience a relapse years after a treatment has finished

Contrave, a new investigational treatment for obesity and weight loss maintenance, has been rejected by the US Food and Drug Administration because of concerns about its cardiovascular safety. The drug’s sponsors are Orexigen Therapeutics and Takeda.

Pfizer Inc has announced plans to exit from research into allergy and respiratory medicines and to close its site in Sandwich UK which houses these activities. The decision is expected to result in the loss of more than 2,000 jobs.

Shares of Antisoma Plc plunged on the London Stock Exchange after the company announced the failure of a Phase 3 cancer trial, the second late-stage product in the company’s pipeline to have failed in just under a year.

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved Novartis’s quadrivalent meningococcal vaccine, Menveo, for children from two to 10 years. But it has turned back an application from the Swiss company for use of the vaccine in infants.

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved Rituxan/MabThera (rituximab) as a maintenance treatment for patients with advanced follicular lymphoma who responded to initial treatment with the antibody, plus chemotherapy, Roche said.