The drug development graveyard that is Alzheimer's disease has claimed yet another victim. This time it's AC Immune SA's ACI-91, a drug that had offered a new approach to tackling this most intractable of diseases.
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Successful treatment of cancer depends not on killing tumor cells, but in beating them into submission using the immune system, a team of German researchers reported. They have identified a type of immune cell that can "re-educate" cancer cells, so that they enter prolonged periods of growth arrest.
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Edmond de Rothschild Investment Partners (EdRIP) gave a progress report on the raising of its BioDiscovery 4 fund as the investment group celebrated its 10th anniversary and set out plans to raise €500 million (US$677 million) for life sciences venture capital and growth capital for small- and mid-cap companies across all sectors, by 2016.
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The UK BioIndustry Association is stepping up its campaign to improve funding for the industry through the creation of Citizens' Innovation Funds (CIFs) that will enable the general public to invest in biotech start-ups.
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Israeli biotech Gamida Cell Ltd. moved lead product StemEx one step closer to becoming potentially the first allogeneic biologic cell product to achieve marketing approval in the U.S. and Europe. The therapy, which uses the company's copper chelator technology, demonstrated overall survival – the primary endpoint – in a Phase II/III study comparing its use in a transplantation regimen to historical controls when treating patients with hematologic malignancies such as leukemia and lymphoma who could not find a family-related matched bone marrow donor following myeloablative therapy.
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Say "emerging markets," and anyone within earshot is likely to think of Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC countries. Africa, not so much.
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• AiCuris GmbH, of Wuppertal, Germany, said it achieved more than 50 percent patient enrollment in the second efficacy trial of herpes simplex virus (HSV) drug pritelivir (formerly AIC316). The study is comparing the potency of pritelivir to valacyclovir in reducing genital HSV shedding.
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