The mosquito-borne, headline-making, brain birth defect-causing Zika virus has reached the U.S., and “I suspect this summer it’s going to be a major problem,” Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc. CEO Joseph Kim told BioWorld Today. Cases of infection already have been confirmed in Colorado, Texas, Hawaii, Florida and Illinois, each involving foreign travel (with pregnant women among them). Read More
SHANGHAI – Beijing-based oncology drug developer Beigene Co. Ltd. updated plans for its Nasdaq IPO, seeking to issue 5.5 million American depository shares, representing 71.5 million ordinary shares, priced between $22 to $24 per share, which would bring in $126.5 million at the midpoint, up from the $100 million stated in its initial SEC filing in October. Read More
Macrophages are able to retain a youthful ability to divide by accessing the same gene expression networks as embryonic stem (ES) cells, researchers from the German Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine and the French Centre d’Immunologie have discovered. Read More
What are the chances that two guys with the same name but no family connection would co-found a company? The odds seem especially slim when the name isn’t just Smith or Jones but Radin – Andrew A., the CEO, and Andrew M., the chief business officer, to be exact. Read More
Partnered with Xenex Disinfection Services LLC to bring the ultraviolet (UV) ray-based “germ-zapping robot” to Africa, Serenus Biotherapeutics Inc. launched the system at a scientific meeting in November, and CEO Menghis Bairu told BioWorld Today that the firm also is making progress on plans to bring drugs to Sub-Saharan Africa. Read More
Agile Therapeutics Inc., of Princeton, N.J., priced a public offering of about 5.5 million shares at $6.35 apiece for gross proceeds of $35 million. The company also granted underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 826,771 additional shares. Read More
Shire plc, of Dublin, said it completed its acquisition of Dyax Corp., of Cambridge, Mass., for $5.9 billion. Dyax shareholders may receive additional value through a nontradable contingent value right that will pay $4 in cash per Dyax share upon approval of next-generation hereditary angioedema drug DX-2930. Read More
Helix Biopharma Corp., of Aurora, Ontario, said it opened patient screening in the second dosing cohort of its ongoing phase I study of L-DOS47 in combination with pemetrexed/carboplatin. The safety review committee reviewed safety data from the first dosing cohort and recommended that Helix begin enrollment of patients into the second cohort, to receive 0.78 mcg of L-DOS47 per kilogram of patient body weight. Read More
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have created bacteria that could survive only if they were fed unnatural amino acids, and continued to be dependent on unnatural amino acids for hundreds of generations without the occurrence of escape mutations. Read More
