DUBLIN – The EMA has activated a COVID-19 task force to coordinate and accelerate the European regulatory response to the pandemic. The task force is intended to take a lead role in shaping the development, authorization and post-approval surveillance of drugs and vaccines for treating or preventing COVID-19 infection.
PARIS – A team of medical researchers and engineers from the Gustave Roussy Institute, in Villejuif, France, and Paris-Sud University recently developed an artificial intelligence system called Resolved2, designed to assess prospective cancer drugs. As Loïc Verlingue, lead cancer specialist on the data science team at the Gustave Roussy Institute, explained to BioWorld MedTech, “this AI is intended to predict efficiently whether a cancer treatment molecule will achieve authorization or not within six years of pharmacological data and phase I clinical trials.”
HONG KONG – SK Holdings Co. Ltd. invested KRW10 billion (US$8.6 million) in Standigm Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered biotech company based in Seoul, Korea. It is the second big investment Standigm has attracted this year after a KRW13 billion series B round in March.
According to an analysis conducted by BioWorld of the third-quarter 2019 financial reports filed by the top 100 public biopharmaceutical companies ranked by market cap, and excluding big pharma companies, the amount that was invested in research and development (R&D) in the period increased almost 70% compared to the same period in 2018.
Drugs for rare diseases now account for 31% of R&D pipelines, up from 18% in 2010 and just 11% in 2005, according to a report from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. That's currently nearly 3,500 drugs in development, more than double the 1,530 in 2010.
