Antisoma Plc has roughly doubled the cash available for developing its advanced products as the result of the sale of US rights to oral fludarabine, a cancer drug it acquired as part of an earlier takeover. The rights were sold to sanofi-aventis for $65 million.
Opsona Therapeutics, a 2004 spinout from Trinity College Dublin with expertise in toll-like receptors, has closed its Series B financing with the addition of the Roche Venture Fund and Enterprise Ireland to the syndicate.
Europe’s biggest public-private partnership in the life sciences, the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), is awarding the equivalent of €246 million to 15 research projects.
The new chief executive officer of MediGene AG has said that partnering negotiations for the pancreatic cancer drug, EndoTAG-1, have reached an 'advanced stage' and management is weighing up its options.
Three European venture investors have topped up a Series A financing for the privately-held US company, Anaphore Inc, which is developing a new generation of protein therapeutics.
The AstraZeneca Plc subsidiary, KuDOS Pharmaceuticals Ltd, has increased its investment in a programme at Newcastle University that seeks to develop drugs inhibiting DNA-dependent protein kinase, thereby improving cancer treatments.
Sepracor Pharmaceuticals Ltd, a subsidiary of Sepracor Inc of Marlborough, Mass., has withdrawn its marketing authorisation application for an insomnia drug from the EMEA because the regulator refused to recognise it as a new active substance.
Max Planck Innovation GmbH, the technology transfer arm of the Max Planck Society, has announced the launch of a new €100 million fund to invest in pharmaceutical projects originating from the society’s research organisations.
In successfully seeking regulatory approval for its first-in-man study of an embryonic stem cell treatment for spinal cord injury, Geron Corporation took great care to characterise all of its materials and processes.
Companies developing new cell and tissue-engineered products shouldn’t expect to see much venture funding for their activities at least until the current recession bottoms out and economic growth resumes, according to a US venture capitalist.