News

The European Patent Office (EPO) has started to apply more stringent criteria to the applications it reviews, including those from the medical sciences.

A closely-held German company with financial support from the Max Planck Society is looking at a new formulation for a therapy based on raft technology, following the product’s achievement of clinical proof of concept in February 2008.

Evotec AG, the German developer of treatments for nervous disorders, is forecasting a revenue increase of 3 to 9 percent in 2008 before any income from out-licensing.

MediGene AG has acquired exclusive rights to a European Patent relating to lipid complexes that can destroy endothelial cells. Originally granted to the University of California, the patent covers technology used in MediGene’s lead cancer product, EndoTAG-1. This technology is being used to develop other products as well, the company said.

The European Medicines Agency has decided that for the time being, there is no need to change the prescribing information for abacavir, a nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor, which is used in combination with other antiviral medicines to treat patients with HIV. This follows the release of data from a large study which suggested that recent use of abacavir may be linked with an increased risk of myocardial infarction, the agency said in a press release issued on 2 April 2008.

In 2007, Silence Therapeutics Plc chose its present name and recruited a new chief executive officer and a vice president for intellectual property in order to sharpen its focus on  RNAi-based therapeutics. These are compounds made up of double-stranded fragments of RNA that can silence genes that lead to disease

Oxford NanoLabs Ltd, a British developer of DNA sequencing technology, has raised £10 million through a private placement of shares.

Pieris AG, a closely-held German company that is developing proteins similar to monoclonal antibodies, has raised €25 million through a series B placement of new shares.

The German drug developer, 4SC AG, said it has advanced negotiations with a number of pharmaceutical companies about licensing out its lead product for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, SC12267.

Newron Pharmaceuticals S.p.A. expects to increase spending on research and development in 2008 as its two lead products, safinamide and ralfinamide, progress through the clinic, and it absorbs the pipeline of Hunter-Fleming, its recent UK acquisition.