Michael Scholl is the Chief Executive Officer of Leukocare AG (Martinsried), where he heads the division's strategy, finance, corporate law, marketing and sales, and human resources. Before co-founding Leukocare in 2003 with Prof. Dr. Martin Scholz, the business engineer worked as a business consultant at Boston Consulting Group and led the foundation and business development of a range of technology and IT companies. Picture: Leukocare AG

Back in February 2017, CDMO Rentschler Biopharma SE and formulation specialist Leukocare AG joined forces to give biologics and biosimilar makers a competitive edge through significantly stabilised end products. European Biotechnology spoke with Leukocare’s CEO Michael Scholl about the impact of formulation on drug product performance.

Life Sciences venture capitalist Forbion has closed its  new flagship fund, Forbion IV, at €360m, €90m above its original target of €250m.

© ASEBIO

Matured, diversified and willing to expand – this is how the Spanish biotech sector presented itself during BIOSPAIN 2018 in Seville. Andalusia has launched the first bioeconomy policy strategy in Spain. 

© Minory Therapeutics SL

Barcelona-based Minoryx Therapeutics announced during BIOSPAIN 2018 it has raised another €21.3m in a Series B financing bringing its assets to a total of €50M. 

A team of researchers from the US and the UK have found that CD4-positive T cells harboring the PD-1 immune checkpoint protein can promote excessive connective tissue formation in lung cells. 

Monoclonal antibodies blocking both PD1 and PDL1 in cancer microenvironment. Currently, four checkpoint inhibitors are approved to treat lung cancer: Merck & Co's pembrolizumab, BMS' nivolumab, AstraZeneca's durvalumab, and Roche's atezolizumab. © Pharmaceutical.com

Cancer immunotherapy has been heralded as paradigm change in cancer treatment. Now, Roche’s US arm Genentech announced that the company’s anti-PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor atezolizumab (Tecentriq) improved survival by only two months as first-line treatment for patients with the rare lung cancer SCLC.

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Ysios Capital, a biotechnology venture capital firm in Spain, today announced that it has appointed Guillem Laporta as Principal.

Anaopheles gambiae, the mosquito that was used in the gene trap experiments. © James D. Gathany - The Public Health Image Library

A new gene drive can cause the complete collapse of caged malaria-carrying mosquito populations, researchers from Imperial College report in Nature Biotechnology. 

Picture: acib GmbH

CYPs have a number of disadvantages, including low stability or inactivity. The Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology (acib), together with an consortium within the EU-project ROBOX, created lyophilised CYP biocatalysts that have proven to be very promising for a variety of industrial applications for the pharma, flavour and fragrance, and material science industries.

Picture: Recipharm

Integrating the disparate stages of drug development is the most time and cost-efficient way of turning a promising candidate compound into a pharmaceutical product. A CDMO that offers coordinated end-to-end services simplifies oversight.