Another vote for cancer immunotherapy came in the form of $50 million in class A stock-sale money for Conkwest Inc., including $48 million from Nantworks Inc. founder and well-known biotech entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong plus $2 million from Sorrento Therapeutics Inc. Read More
WASHINGTON – A substantial portion of basic medical research goes someplace to expire without ever seeing clinical daylight, but the last day of TERMIS 2014, sponsored by the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) earlier this month highlighted some ingenious technological developments, some of which will surely find a place in routine use. Read More
With courts cracking down on pay-for-delay (PFD) settlements between brand drugmakers and generic competitors, the impact of those settlements may be on the decline. Read More
Scientists have developed a vaccine that partially protected deer from developing chronic wasting disease (CWD), a prion disease that is the deer equivalent of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other prion diseases, as well as Scrapie in sheep, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or 'mad cow disease') in cattle. Read More
BioWorld's offices were closed Thursday, Dec. 25, in observance of the Christmas Day holiday in the U.S. No issues were published those days. Read More
Amarantus Bioscience Holdings Inc., of San Francisco, said the FDA granted the company's investigational drug MANF (mesencephalic-astrocyte-derived neurotrophic factor) orphan drug designation for the treatment of retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a group of inherited diseases causing retinal degeneration often leading to blindness. Read More
Actavis plc, of Dublin, received a complete response letter (CRL) from the FDA for its new drug application (NDA) for the fixed-dose combination (FDC) of nebivolol and valsartan for the treatment of hypertension. Data submitted to the FDA in support of approval of this NDA included a single phase III randomized, controlled trial of approximately 4,100 patients. Read More
Juno Therapeutics Inc., of Seattle, reported the closing of its initial public offering (IPO) of 12.7 million shares of common stock at $24 per share, which includes the exercise in full by the underwriters of the offering of their option to purchase 1.7 million shares. Read More
Kinex Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Buffalo, N.Y., said the first patient has been dosed with KX2-361 at Roswell Park Cancer Institute. KX2-361 (KX02), a dual src/pre-tubulin inhibitor, is a small molecule drug that has shown potent inhibitory activity against a broad panel of brain tumor cell lines, including those that are resistant to Temozolomide (T98G), the most widely used chemotherapy for the treatment of malignant glioma. Read More
