News

Cancer Research UK has agreed to conduct a first-in-man study of a novel anti-cancer drug owned by GlaxoSmithKline, but not currently a priority of the UK multinational.

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Sepracor Pharmaceuticals Ltd, a subsidiary of Sepracor Inc of Marlborough, Mass., has withdrawn its marketing authorisation application for an insomnia drug from the EMEA because the regulator refused to recognise it as a new active substance.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.