A day after Pacira Pharmaceuticals Inc. priced its $42 million initial public offering (IPO), two more life sciences companies followed: Oncology firm Endocyte Inc. priced 12.5 million shares at $6 each to raise $75 million while diagnostics company BG Medicine Inc. set a $7 price for 5 million shares to bring in $35 million. (See BioWorld Today, Feb. 4, 2011.) Read More
Near-simultaneous recent announcements that London-based GlaxoSmithKline plc and AstraZeneca plc are dropping internal drug discovery efforts in various central nervous system (CNS) diseases has led to some talk of an overall big pharma retrenchment from those disorders. Read More
When adult cells are turned into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, their DNA does not change. What does change is the pattern of epigenetic marks on the DNA. Those epigenetic marks, of which methylation is the most important type, are what determines which genes will be expressed in a given cell. Read More
Billed as legislation that would make the first significant changes to the U.S. patent system in nearly 60 years, the Patent Reform Act of 2011 got the unanimous approval the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday and moves on to the full Senate. Read More
LONDON – The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has promised to reduce the attrition rate in drug development and start a debate on how new fields such as personalized medicine, nanomedicines and stem cell therapies should be regulated, as part of Road Map To 2015, its strategy for how it will develop its role over the next five years. Read More
Ambrilia Biopharma Inc., of Montreal, said the Toronto Stock Exchange advised the firm that its shares would be delisted at the close of market March 4 for failure to meet listing requirements. Read More
pSivida Corp., of Watertown, Mass., and Alimera Sciences Inc., of Atlanta, reported 36-month, top-line results for the FAME study of Iluvien in diabetic macular edema, showing statistically significant therapeutic effects with 28.9 percent at month 30 (p = 0.011) and 28.4 percent at month 33 (p = 0.042) of Iluvien patients gaining 15 or more letters compared to the control group, in which fewer than 17 percent of patients gained 15 or more letters. Read More
Researchers from the NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Program reported their first success in pinpointing the genetic cause for a mysterious disorder (the only type of disorder the undiagnosed diseases program takes on). Read More
