News

The European Medicines Agency has taken the first step towards implementing new European-wide procedures for testing medicines in children.

DSM Venturing BV, the venture capital arm of Royal DSM NV of the Netherlands, has made a €2 million equity investment in Jurilab Oy, in what Jurilab’s chief executive, Kari Paukkeri, describes as a “strategic alignment.”

German government institutions and private biotech companies are setting up a screening network that is intended to help medical researchers at universities translate their work into potential therapies.

Acambis Plc said its smallpox vaccine, ACAM2000, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for active immunisation of persons determined to be at high risk of smallpox infection.

Antisoma Plc has reported positive results from a Phase 2 trial of its cancer drug, ASA404, which is intended to treat non-small-cell lung cancer. Data from the trial will be disclosed at the World Lung Cancer Conference in Soeul, Korea on 5 September 2007.

Marks & Clerk is to absorb the Lloyd Wise Group in a merger scheduled for completion by the end of 2007. Both firms are patent and trade mark attorneys based in London.

Vivalis, a French company that has developed a stem cell technology for the manufacture of vaccines, said it has licensed-in platform technology from North Carolina State University for producing undifferentiated avian cell cultures using avian primordial germ cells.

A proposed reform of US patent law, which is now before the US Congress, could have a significant impact on European life science companies doing business in the US as well as on efforts towards international patent harmonisation.

A team of international scientists using data collected from HIV-infected patients in Europe and Australia has identified three polymorphisms that appear to play a role in helping some of these individuals fight infection and delay the onset of AIDS.

TheraGenetics Ltd, a spinout from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College in London in April 2006, hopes to have its gene-based diagnostic tests ready in about two years, its chief executive, Richard Kivel, said.