The U.K. government has secured a deal guaranteeing there will be no tariffs on the £6.6 billion (US$8.7 billion) of pharmaceutical products exported annually to the U.S., as part of a package of measures under which the U.K. will pay more for patented drugs.

Vandria SA published phase I data on a potential new mechanism of action in treating Alzheimer’s disease, demonstrating its orally available and brain-penetrant mitochondria-boosting compound, VNA-318, engages its intended target.

Novo Nordisk A/S’ wild card bet that its GLP-1 receptor agonist semaglutide could be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease has not paid off, with the company reporting two phase III trials have shown no effect on slowing disease progression.

The Scottish government has published a strategy setting out a roadmap to more than double the size of Scotland’s life sciences sector over the next 10 years. The most recent data show the sector currently contributes £10.5 billion (US$13.8 billion) in turnover to the economy, supporting 46,000 jobs. The aim of the strategy is to increase this to £25 billion by 2035.

It’s the biological resource that keeps on giving, and now UK Biobank has released the final tranche of data on the levels of 249 metabolites in the blood of its half a million participants.

Two Flagship Pioneering Inc. biopharma companies founded in the last five years and focused on proteomic and genomic technologies entered agreements to help discover new therapeutics for respiratory and liver diseases under a framework collaboration with GSK plc. Under that agreement, Profound Therapeutics Inc. and Quotient Therapeutics Inc. would use their platform technologies to discover novel proteins and targets for developing drugs to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, with Quotient taking on a third indication with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis.

U.S. and European organ-on-a-chip specialty biotechnology companies are driving development of organ-on-a-chip technologies, fueled by the U.S. FDA’s decision to phase out animal testing for investigational new drugs.

The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is calling for unified standards to harmonize microbiome research, after revealing major inconsistencies in the results when labs around the world analyzed identical reference samples of gut bacteria.

Growth factor specialist Agomab Therapeutics NV is now preparing to move into phase IIb development after delivering positive phase IIa results for its lead program, ontunisertib, an orally available treatment for fibrostenosing Crohn’s disease.

DNA damage response specialist Artios Ltd. has closed an oversubscribed $115 million series D after delivering positive phase I/IIa data for its two lead programs.