• Beactica AB, of Uppsala, Sweden, inked an agreement with Almac Discovery Ltd., of Craigavon, Northern Ireland, for the use of its drug discovery platform, Sprint, to identify high-quality fragment hits against undisclosed targets of therapeutic interest to Almac. Beactica specializes in surface plasmon resonance biosensor-based small-molecule interaction analysis and partnerships for fragment-based lead generation using the Sprint platform.
LONDON – Closing the year with some cheer for the sector, Tissue Regenix Group plc has raised £25 million (US$39 million) in a placing, enabling the regenerative medicine specialist to begin to advance several programs in parallel.
LONDON – The health care sector in Europe has joined forces to push for industry involvement in the health technology assessments (HTA) that are increasingly being carried out to measure the added-value of new therapies, and then used as the basis of deciding whether or not to pay for them.
LONDON – A potent and rapid new method for analyzing the function of any mammalian gene is set to revolutionize the study of genetics. For the first time, scientists have managed to produce and grow mammalian embryonic stem cells containing only half the normal complement of chromosomes – a goal that researchers have striven to achieve for decades.
Molecular Partners AG entered a strategic alliance with Janssen Biotech Inc., under which it will team up with the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary to develop a broad pipeline of drugs, based on its Darpin scaffold technology, for a range of immunology indications.
EMBL Ventures GmbH took in €40 million (US$53.5 million) in a first closing of its second fund, bringing an additional tranche of early stage investment to Germany's cash-starved biotechnology sector. And it hopes to add at least another €10 million in a second closing.
LONDON – The European Commission confirmed its plans to increase spending on research and development from €55 billion (US$74.1 billion) in the current seven-year program to €80 billion from 2014 through 2020, and said that €8 billion would go directly to small companies. In parallel, a new scheme to support research-based start-ups worth a further €2.5 billion was announced.
In a potential $450 million deal, MacroGenics Inc. has signed up the privately held French pharmaceutical company Servier as partner for MGA271, a first-in-class antibody targeting B7-H3, an antigen that is expressed in a long and growing list of solid tumors.
• Genetic Technologies Ltd., of Melbourne, Australia, said it executed a settlement and license agreement granting AutoImmun Diagnostika GmbH, of Strassberg, Germany, nonexclusive rights to a number of its patents relating to noncoding DNA technology. Financial terms were not disclosed.
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