A pancreatic islet from a mouse in a typical position, close to a blood vessel; insulin in red, nuclei in blue. © Jakob Suckale

Novo Nordisk and Evotec have joined forces to find new drugs in the lucrative diabetes and obesity markets.

Cholangitis leads to liver fibrosis and ends up in cirrhosis. @ Genkyotex SA

French Genkyotex SA has secured an €7.5m gross financing to expand the scope of its Phase II product GKT831 in Primary Biliary Cholangitis (PBC).

Roche AG’s ALK blocker Alecensa (alectinib) has been granted market approval by China National Drug Administration as first line NSCLC monotherapy in patients with ALK-positive non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC)

 BioNTech AG has partnered with Pfizer to develop a mRNA-based flu vaccine. 

Langerhans cells (red) are immune cells in the skin and keratinocytes (blue) are the cells that make up the top layer of the skin. The image shows Langerhans cells positioned in close association with the keratinocytes that Langerhans cells protect against sunlight-induced injury. © W.D. Shipman

EGFR agonists support the protective effect of Langerhans against UV-induced damage of skin cells, a hallmark of lupus erythematosus and other autoimmune and dermatologic conditions, a team of US and German researchers report.

A team of Scots, Belgian and Spanish researchers claim they have found a target to prevent failure of liver regeneration following intoxination or acute injury. 

London-headquartered gene therapy Orchard Therapeutics has closed a US-$150m series C financing round to push MAAs and BLAs of three late-stage gene therapies by 2021.

When DDR fails, the tumour cell dies. © Artios Pharma Ltd.

Life Sciences Partners and Andera Partners together with Pfizer Ventures and Novartis Venture Fund have put €85m into the cancer drug development company Artios Pharma Ltd.

Reduced myelination (right) in rats with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease 1A vs healthy rats (left). © umg/mpgem

German neurogenetics at the Max-Planck-Institute for Experimental Medicine have cured the rare incurable hereditary Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease by simply supplementing the food of mice carrying the disease-causing duplication of the PMP22 gene with lecithin. The phospholipid supplementation enabled Schwann cells deficient in lipid synthesis to restore the insulating myelin sheet around peripheral neurons which is needed to speed up neuronal transmission.

Mice deficient in Thy-1 (right) displayed decreased bone formation and mineralised bone matrix (black) in the tibia compared to wild-type mice (left). © A.-K. Picke et al., Science Translational Medicine (2018)

German researchers have found a molecular switch that determines whether mesenchymal fibroblasts differentiate into fat- or bone-forming cells opening the avenue to modulation of the processes.