After Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway Inc and JP Morgan Chase & Co announced on 30 January that they will take steps to reduce the rising cost of US health insurance, shares of health insurance companies and pharmacies declined.
AstraZeneca Plc delivered a 4% increase in product sales in the fourth quarter of 2017, pointing towards a return to growth. This comes nearly four years after it fought off a hostile takeover bid, and started to rebuild its portfolio to offset the expiry of patents on its core products.
The rise in clinical trials for prospective gene therapies has generated new business for Biotec Pharmacon ASA, a Norwegian company with a portfolio of research products derived from the natural environment.
Legacy drugs accounted for half of pharmaceutical sales at Roche in 2017, but this was partially offset by strong growth for a group of recently launched products including new medicines for multiple sclerosis, haemophilia A and cancer.
A decades’ long discussion in the EU about how to establish common rules for assessing the value of new medicines has come to a conclusion with a proposal from the European Commission on 31 January to regulate health technology assessment (HTA).
Foundry Innovation & Research 1 Ltd (FIRE1) has raised €40 million in a Series C financing round to advance development of a medical device that uses digital technology to remotely monitor the health of patients who have had heart failure.
A two-year old company targeting the market for synthetic biology has raised £9 million to advance a new gene synthesis platform. Evonetix Ltd of Cambridge UK has technology that enables the parallel synthesis of DNA on silicon arrays.
A new agreement for fighting cancer by targeting the tumour microenvironment has been announced by the AstraZeneca Plc unit MedImmune and Innate Pharma SA of France. The goal is to overcome some of the limitations of the current checkpoint inhibitors.
Storm Therapeutics Ltd has recruited the Nobel Laureate Thomas Cech to its scientific advisory board as the company looks to develop small molecule modulators of RNA epigenetics. Storm was founded in 2015 and has raised £16 million in Series A financing.
Sanofi SA has successfully wooed the board of Ablynx to agree to a merger that values the Belgian company at €3.9 billion, or 46 times its revenue for 2016. In early January, Ablynx rejected a €2.6 billion takeover bid from Novo Nordisk A/S.