BOSTON – About 900 attendees and 530 companies are converging on the waterfront Westin hotel here for the sixth annual Biopharm America partnering conference, sponsored by the EBD Group. Read More
SHANGHAI – Hu Fang was the poster boy for China’s potential in biomedicine back in 2005. At the head of Shanghai Sunway Biotech Co. Ltd., he saw the need to bring innovative drug development to China and found a truly entrepreneurial method to do it: Take a molecule patented in the U.S. that had been gathering dust after an aborted early stage clinical trial and develop it for the China market. Read More
Galena Biopharma Inc. priced an underwritten public offering of 17.5 million units of stock at $2 per unit, for gross proceeds of $35 million. The funds will be used for commercialization of Abstral (fentanyl) sublingual tablets, and to support an ongoing Phase III trial of Neuvax. Read More
Pitching a rare disease program to prospective partners and investors these days sounds like it should be a fairly easy task. Biotech and pharma firms have more than 500 programs in the rare disease pipeline and orphan indications are an increasingly hot property for the industry. (See BioWorld Insight, April 29, 2013.) Read More
Using an approach that is complementary to genomewide association studies (GWAS), researchers have identified the cholesterol metabolism gene EPHX2 as playing a role in anorexia. Read More
• Champions Oncology Inc., of Hackensack, N.J., said it signed a new discovery and drug development partnership with Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., which will use their Tumorgraft technology platform to enhance and accelerate the clinical development of several of Teva’s oncology compounds. Read More
• Merck & Co. Inc., of Whitehouse Station, N.J., and Johnson & Johnson (J&J), of New Brunswick, N.J., agreed to provide financial support for Startx, the accelerator that spun out of Stanford University in 2009. Read More
• Gilead Sciences Inc., of Foster City, Calif., disclosed 48-week results from a Phase II study (Study 102) evaluating an investigational once-daily single tablet regimen containing tenofovir alafenamide (TAF) for the treatment of HIV-1 infection. Read More
• Prana Biotechnology Ltd., of Melbourne, Australia, said data from the Phase II Reach 2HD trial testing PBT2 in Huntington’s disease would be reported in early 2014 rather than the fourth quarter of this year, due to a delay in finalizing the database and locking the data prior to statistical analysis. Read More
Researchers from the Dutch Erasmus Center have shown that H7N9-type influenza virus can bind to cells of both the upper and lower human respiratory tract. Read More
