News

Sanofi SA has stepped up its investment in messenger RNA (mRNA) with plans to create a new unit devoted exclusively to the technology in Cambridge, Mass, US, and Marcy l’Etoile, Lyon, France. On 29 June, the company announced plans to spend €400 million per year to accelerate the research and development of mRNA vaccines against a broad group of infectious diseases.

A UK company with technology for delivering peptides to the cytosol of cells, has raised £6.2 million in seed financing to investigate the application of its technology across a range of therapies. The financing was co-led by incoming investor Octopus Ventures and existing investor M Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Merck KGaA. NanoSyrinx was founded in 2020 by Joseph Healey, Nicholas Waterfield and Alexia Hapeshi to commercialise research conducted at the University of Warwick’s Medical School.

MorphoSys AG has increased its share capital with the issue of 1,337,552 new ordinary shares to a subsidiary of Royalty Pharma Plc as part of a long-term financial partnership that is enabling the German company to acquire Constellation Pharmaceuticals Inc of the US. The share deal will generate $100 million for MorphoSys and give Royalty Pharma Investments 3.9% of the German company’s registered share capital. MorphoSys completed the acquisition of Constellation on 15 July, giving it one of the first US companies to develop drugs in the field of epigenetics.

The European Medicines Agency has given a positive scientific review to a new treatment for achondroplasia, a condition that impairs bone growth and causes dwarfism. It is recommending that a marketing authorisation be issued to BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc, the developer, for use of Voxzogo (vosoritide) in patients two years and older whose epiphyses, or growth plates of the bones, are not yet closed. This condition must be confirmed by genetic testing. The medicine was evaluated in 121 patients with achondroplasia between the ages of five and 18 years.

Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, has asked federal officials to conduct an investigation of interactions between agency staff and executives at Biogen Inc in the process that led up to the FDA’s approval of Aduhelm (aducanumab) for Alzheimer’s disease on 7 June. A letter was sent to the acting inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services on 9 July and distributed globally on the same day on Twitter.

A new biotech company co-located in Denmark and Belgium, has been launched with €60 million in Series A funding to investigate potential small molecule therapies for neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease. Muna Therapeutics draws on the expertise of scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark and KU Leuven in Belgium. Early entrepreneurial support was provided by Novo Seeds, a unit of the Novo Holdings A/S investment group.

A US company developing models of cancer tumours derived from the tissues of actual patients has received $70 million in Series A financing in order to advance its diagnostic technology. Xilis Inc of Durham, North Carolina has taken the concept of the organoid, a miniaturised organ, and adapted it to oncology. The financing was led by Mubadala Capital with participation by the new investors GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Life Sciences Partners (LSP) as well as existing investors.

The board of directors of GlaxoSmithKline Plc has issued a strong endorsement of the company’s chief executive Emma Walmsley a day after activist investor Elliott Advisors called on it to appoint new members and review the executive leadership at the company. Elliott reportedly started accumulating shares in GSK in April, just weeks before the UK company gave details about its plans to spin out its consumer healthcare division and consolidate its vaccine and pharma businesses in the company New GSK.

Two European companies have decided to combine their expertise to develop a candidate gene therapy for the treatment of hereditary angioedema (HAE), a rare protein deficiency that can cause swelling in multiple parts of the body. Pharming Group NV, which already has an HAE product on the market, is to pay Orchard Therapeutics Plc for rights to a preclinical gene therapy programme for the same disease. The therapy, OTL-105, is an investigational ex vivo autologous haematopoietic stem cell therapy delivered with a lentiviral vector.

CureVac NV’s candidate messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine against Covid-19 has shown an overall efficacy rate of 48% in a large Phase 2b/3 trial during which multiple new strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were in circulation. The efficacy rate was achieved against Covid-19 disease of any severity, including single non-respiratory mild symptoms, the developer announced on 30 June.