Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., of Jerusalem, said it enrolled the first patient in the Pride-HD study, a phase II trial designed to evaluate the impact of pridopidine, an oral, small molecule, on motor impairment in patients with Huntington's disease (HD). Read More
Daiichi Sankyo Co. Ltd., of Tokyo, and Agendia BV, of Amsterdam, inked an oncology drug development and personalized medicine deal calling for Agendia's oncology biomarker technology to be used in the assessment of pharmaceuticals now being researched in certain Daiichi clinical trials. Read More
Vernalis plc, of Winnersh, U.K., reported the results from a phase Ib/II proof-of-concept study of V81444, an A2A antagonist which has potential applications for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other disorders of the central nervous system. Read More
Biogen Idec Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., and biopharma development and commercial outsourcing firm Quintiles, of Research Triangle Park, N.C., entered a five-year clinical development agreement designed to optimize Biogen's clinical development processes. Read More
Juno Therapeutics Inc., of Seattle, said it closed its series A round with $176 million in fully committed funds. The company's initial funding of $120 million came from Arch Venture Partners and the Alaska Permanent Fund. Read More
HONG KONG – An Indian pharmaceutical company said it is still exporting its products to Vietnam as usual, disputing reports that it had been one of some four-dozen companies allegedly banned from the growing Southeast Asian market. Read More
Researchers have come up with an unusual variation of the theme of drug-device combinations. They have used cochlear implants as electroporation devices to enable gene therapy during implantation, which in turn stimulated nerve outgrowth that allowed the implant to perform better. Read More
Crispr Therapeutics AG, a start-up formed by the co-inventor of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing technology, closed a $25 million series A round that will fund the translation of this hugely popular approach from the academic lab to the clinic. Read More
TAIPEI, Taiwan – Taiwan's government-funded Development Center for Biotechnology (DCB) said this week that its mTOR inhibitor cancer drug candidate, DCBCI0901, developed in-house and licensed out in 2011 to an alliance of four local pharmaceutical companies, received approval from the FDA and the TFDA to begin phase I trials. Read More
Despite strong economic and logistical arguments to be made for conducting clinical trials in Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRIC countries), increasingly complex regulation, corruption and patent challenges are forcing drugmakers to up their game to succeed, according to a new report from Thomson Reuters Life Sciences. Read More
Hyperion Therapeutics Inc. broadened its orphan disease pipeline in a big way by inking an agreement to acquire Andromeda Biotech Ltd., an Israel-based subsidiary of Clal Biotechnology Industries Ltd., in a carefully crafted deal that links much of the economics to back-end milestones. Read More
Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Cheshire, Conn., reported that first quarter net product sales increased 67 percent to $566.6 million, compared to $338.9 million in the same period last year. Excluding the impact of $87.8 million for reimbursement of prior year shipments, net product sales went up 41 percent to $478.8 million. Read More
