Merck & Co Inc has ended its multi-year drug-target discovery alliances with Galápagos NV of Belgium citing changes in its corporate strategy. It will pay Galápagos €12 million for work completed in 2010.
Phase 3 trial results of a new antibiotic for infections from C. difficile have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The antibiotic, fidaxomicin, showed lower recurrence rates and better cure rates compared with vancomycin.
Following a decline in 2010 net profit of 67%, GlaxoSmithKline Plc acted to support shareholder confidence by raising its dividend by 7% for the year and to launching a new long-term share repurchase programme that could see it buy back between £1 and 2 billion worth of its shares in 2011.
Group sales at Roche were flat in 2010 reflecting a decline in influenza product sales and the impact of lower US and European healthcare spending. Restructuring measures cost the company CHF 1.3 billion (€1 billion) last year.
Novo Nordisk A/S’s comprehensive diabetes franchise continued to flourish in 2010 with sales of diabetes products rising by 21.9% to DKK 45,710 million (€6,132 million), the company announced.
Eli Lilly Company and Bristol-Myers Squibb have announced the stopping of enrollment in one of their two global Phase 3 studies of necitumumab, an investigational treatment for first-line advanced non-small cell lung cancer.
The European Union has allocated €3.3 million to a gene therapy consortium which is working on a possible treatment for acute intermittent porphyria (AIP), a metabolic disorder. A treatment has been developed by Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics (AMT).
Four research groups from the US and Europe have joined together in a collaboration to discover and map the genes that contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. The primary goal is to understand the role that inheritance plays in the disease.
Despite the many achievements of modern cancer therapies, one uncertainty continues to haunt the industry. This is knowing whether a patient who has apparently been treated successfully with chemotherapy or a targeted antibody therapy will nonetheless experience a relapse years after a treatment has finished
Contrave, a new investigational treatment for obesity and weight loss maintenance, has been rejected by the US Food and Drug Administration because of concerns about its cardiovascular safety. The drug’s sponsors are Orexigen Therapeutics and Takeda.