SHANGHAI – When it went public in April 2007, Simcere Pharmaceutical Group quickly became the largest Chinese pharmaceutical listed in the U.S. Despite a good early performance, the stock never lived up to its promise. The firm’s share price crashed to below $5 after the global financial crisis and has been lingering at below $10 since late 2011 . Simcere, originally a maker of generics that has expanded into biologicals, will go private before the end of the year.

• Medivir AB, of Stockholm, Sweden, said it discontinued development of its hepatitis B compound, MIV-201, based on a joint decision with Daewong Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., of South Korea.

With the start of a Phase III trial of its lead compound tinnitus drug AM-101 imminent, Auris Medical AG has completed a second Phase II trial, which further rounds out its understanding of how to administer the therapy.

Shares in Transgene SA dropped 13 percent last week on news that the oncolytic immunotherapy Pexa-Vec (JX-594, pexastimogene devacirepvec) failed to attain the primary endpoint of overall survival in a Phase IIb trial in 80 patients with advanced liver cancer.

LONDON – Arsanis Inc. has raised $20 million in Series B funding that will enable the Austro-American company to take its lead monoclonal antibody product, ASN-100, through Phase I/IIa development in the treatment of severe, hospital-acquired Staphylococcus aureus infections.

LONDON – Kiadis Pharma BV announced positive results in a five-year follow-up of the Phase I/II study of ATIR, a cell therapy for enabling hematopoietic stem cell transplants from non-identical donors.

LONDON – Delivering synthetic messenger RNA that encodes the right growth factor directly to the heart muscle shortly after a heart attack can induce heart stem cells to divide and mature into new blood vessels, a new study has shown. Mice treated in that way showed a long-term increase in survival.

LONDON – Almac Discovery sealed a £13 million (US$20.4 million) collaboration with Queen’s University Belfast, which will see 17 Almac scientists seconded for three years to work at the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology at the university.

Hospira Inc. has reached a major milestone in the development of the biosimilar drugs market by gaining formal European Commission approval for Europe’s first biosimilar monoclonal antibody, Inflectra (infliximab), which is based on the blockbuster TNF-alpha inhibitor Remicade (infliximab). It represents the first major dent in the armor of the biotechnology industry’s most valuable franchise.

MUNICH and HEIDELBERG, Germany – Biotech’s summer of love has been an overwhelmingly American affair. The flood of U.S. initial public offerings (IPOs) completed in 2013 – by the end of August, 26 companies had raised $1.84 billion – threatens to further widen the already large gulf between the U.S. and European biopharma sectors.