Bioeconomy:?It could be a turning point for the fish meal and fish oil dependent animal feed industry in Europe. Since July, the European Commission has allowed the use of insect-processed animal proteins for aquaculture. According to experts, the use of insect meal as a sustainable alternative opens an US$90bn market. 

Billionaire Bill Gates announced he is going to invest US$50m private money into the Dementia Discovery Fund (DDF) to support fresh ideas for developing Alzheimer drugs and diagnostics. The venture capital fund, which kicked off in 2015, includes investors such as GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Biogen Idec as well as the UK government.

The brand new 19th Guide to German Biotech Companies 2018 provides a wealth of information on companies and organisations offering products and services in the life sciences.

Serialisation of drugs is confronting pharmaceutical companies all over the world with challenges, especially in relation to data handling and the integration of additional equipment and functions into existing packaging lines. Offline solutions, where secondary packaging is serialized directly by the folding-box manufacturer, combined with sophisticated data flow architectures, are a reliable, flexible, and immediately available alternative to inline serialisation.

The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) recommended seven medicines for approval, including two orphan medicines, plus three generics at its November 2017 meeting.

More than 4,000 participants from all over the globe visited Berlin in early November to take part in this year’s BIO-Europe. The event continues to be on the upswing – like the biotech industry itself.

Conversion of agricultural waste into useful products is a worldwide need. As part of the European Project Valor Plus, Spanish biotechindustry association ASEBIO invited its members to visit the recently opened second-generation biorefinery Clamber.

For the first time researchers at universities Bochum (Germany), Salzburg (Austria), and Modena (Italy) have shown that autologous transgenic keratinocyte cultures can regenerate an entire, fully functional epidermis on a seven-year-old child suffering from junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB).

German inflammation and autoimmunity specialist InflaRx AG (Jena) announced it will offer 6,667,000 common shares at an Nasdaq initial public offering price of $15.00 per common share, resulting in total gross proceeds of approximately US$100m.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has lifted the clinical hold due to a patient death on Phase I testing of UCART123 in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN).