SAN FRANCISCO – Atop its eye-opening $450 million financing earlier this month, Moderna Therapeutics Inc. stacked another $50 million from Merck & Co. Inc. as well as an equity investment of $50 million from the pharma giant in a three-year license and collaboration deal that gives Merck rights to commercialize five product candidates that could come from the arrangement, designed to explore vaccines and passive immunity treatments against viral diseases using modified messenger RNA (mRNA). Read More
SAN FRANCISCO – Roche AG left no moss growing under its feet at the 33rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, disclosing a second large deal a day after paying $1.03 billion for a majority stake in genomics analysis firm Foundation Medicine Inc. Read More
SAN FRANCISCO – Gilead Sciences Inc.'s president and chief operating officer, John Milligan, told attendees of the 33rd annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that the Foster City, Calif.-based company's hepatitis C virus (HCV) therapy Sovaldi (sofosbuvir) is now broadly covered across most of the health plans in America and is making continuing progress in Europe, providing access for more patients than ever before. Read More
LONDON – The National Health Service (NHS) in England is to stop paying for 16 high-cost oncology products in a move that has offended clinicians, patients groups and companies, and once again has drawn attention to the inequity of having a separate mechanism to pay for cancer treatments, under which they are not subject to the same value assessments as drugs for other indications. Read More
SAN FRANCISCO – Cortendo AB, a small orphan-focused company developing a therapy for Cushing's syndrome, is raising up to $27.5 million in a private placement led by RA Capital Management, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Broadfin Capital. Read More
SAN FRANCISCO – Shares of Pharmacyclics Inc. jumped 11.4 percent in afterhours trading Monday following a lively afternoon presentation during which the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based firm told attendees of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that it expected cancer drug Imbruvica (ibrutinib) to hit blockbuster status in 2015. Read More
SHANGHAI – Wuxi Pharmatech Inc., of Shanghai, is another step closer to becoming a one-stop shop for drug development with the acquisition of Nextcode Health, a genomic sequencing and bioinformatics company with operations in the U.S. and Iceland. Read More
Myrbetriq (mirabegron, Astellas Pharma Inc.), which is approved for the treatment of overactive bladder, may find itself useful in another indication. In a phase I trial, the drug activated brown fat and increased the metabolic rate of healthy male volunteers. Read More
HONG KONG – The CFDA approved the country's first-ever orally administrated and subtype-selective histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi). Patients in China with relapsed or refractory peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL) now have an alternative treatment other than traditional chemotherapy. Read More
Aldeyra Therapeutics Inc., of Lexington, Mass., entered a definitive purchase agreement to raise approximately $7.79 million in a private placement of 1.1 million shares of common stock at $7 each, and warrants to purchase up to 1.1 million shares of common stock at an exercise price of $9.50. Read More
Amgen Inc., of Thousand Oaks, Calif., and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center formed a research collaboration focused on Amgen's bispecific T-cell engager antibody constructs, an immunotherapy that serves as a bridge between T cells and cancer cells. Read More
Precision Biologics Inc., of Rockville, Md., reported overall survival (OS) data from its ongoing phase II study of monoclonal antibody NPC-1C in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer who have exhausted all standard therapies. Read More
Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, of Ingelheim, Germany, said it inked a collaboration with Yale University with the goal of researching novel therapeutic targets in the field of immune-modulation. Read More
A subsidiary of Merck & Co. Inc., of Whitehouse Station, N.J., and Eli Lilly and Co., of Indianapolis, formed an oncology clinical trial collaboration to evaluate the safety, tolerability and efficacy of Keytruda (pembrolizumab), Merck's anti-PD-1 therapy, in combination with Lilly compounds in multiple clinical trials. Read More
