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 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).
German MAB Discovery GmbH has extended its 2013 collaboration with BioNTech AG by a contract to produce another set of therapeutic antibodies against a range of targets delivered by BioNTec.
In 2017, the European biotech sector witnessed a volume increase in IPOs and follow-on financings. This says the most recent capital market report of BIOCOM which is published during BIO-Europe on November 6.
Swiss oncolytic virus and vaccine specialist NousCom has closed a €42m Series B financing round led by new investor Abingworth. Co-investors include new 5AM Ventures, and existing investors LSP and Versant Ventures.