French biotech Pep-Therapy SAS is taking its potentially first-in-class cancer cell penetrating peptide technology into the clinic, after raising €5.4 million (US$6.4 million) in an extended series A funding round. The series A fundraiser initially brought in €2.6 million, but the extension brought in a further €1.6 million in equity from Anaxago, i&i Prague and Badge as well as a €1 million loan from Bpifrance.
LONDON – The message that COVID-19 is a disease of the elderly needs to change, according to U.K. researchers who have analyzed complications suffered by 73,197 patients admitted to 302 hospitals in the first wave of the pandemic last year.
Hoping to get Germany to drop its opposition to a proposed World Trade Organization (WTO) waiver of intellectual property (IP) rights, several U.S. lawmakers have asked to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel when she’s in Washington for a July 15 summit with President Joe Biden.
DUBLIN – Poolbeg Pharma plc raised £25 million (US$35 million) in an IPO on London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) to pursue development of antiviral drugs. The company priced the offering at 10 pence per share, which implies a valuation of £50 million. Shares are due to commence trading on Monday, July 19.
It’s more than 20 years since the tobacco firm Philip Morris International Inc. commissioned a controversial research paper, “Public Finance Balance of Smoking in the Czech Republic,” which infamously argued that smokers cut state health care expenditure by dying early. The paper was considered an outrage and led to a high-profile apology from the company, after being widely derided by politicians and commentators internationally. The company’s July 9 proposal to buy the respiratory diseases firm Vectura Group plc for $1.2 billion is already looking just as provocative according to U.K. politicians and anti-smoking groups, who are calling for the government to intervene to stop it going ahead.
Europe’s clinical trial registry is a mess with patchy and incomplete data, according to a scathing review of the system from researchers based at the U.K.’s University of Oxford, who hope that a revamp at the end of the year could improve matters.
NICE has said “no” to regular NHS funding for a rare disease gene therapy from Orchard Therapeutics Ltd. in draft guidance – although experience from Novartis AG’s pricey Zolgensma (onasemnogene abeparvovec) for spinal muscular atrophy shows this could change. That’s because this week NICE published final guidance that recommends funding for Zolgensma, thought to be the world’s most expensive drug, after an initial rejection late last year.
LONDON – The U.K. intends to take the positives from its response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a blueprint for developing treatments for a range of other diseases and the basis for a new 10-year strategy for the life sciences.
LONDON – Nerre Therapeutics Ltd. will have another go at delivering proof of efficacy for its chronic cough treatment, after raising £20 million (US$27.6 million) in a series B2 round.
DUBLIN – Bacteriophage, like other viruses, can be viewed as complex molecular machines with two essential functions: infection and replication. The first involves the efficient injection into the host cell of their genomic payload; the second involves hijacking the host’s nucleic acid replication machinery to generate the functional and structural proteins needed to give rise to progeny viruses.
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