News

The UK government has decided to change its 50-year old system for indirectly setting the price of drugs sold to the National Health Service (NHS).

Shares of GPC Biotech AG have begun to recover after the company announced that it was withdrawing its New Drug Application (NDA) with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for accelerated approval of its cancer-drug candidate, satraplatin.

A joint committee of the UK Parliament is supporting the creation and use of hybrid, human-animal embryos for research provided they are destroyed within 14 days after fertilisation and they are not implanted in a womb, according to the committee’s chairman, Phil Willis, the Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough.

Over the past 19 months, some 272 small enterprises have approached the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) to ask for assistance in carrying out their development and registration programmes, according to new figures from the agency.

Kinaxo Biotechnologies GmbH has received a grant of about €1 million from Germany’s Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to develop a new way of quantifying small molecule-protein interactions by combining mass spectrometry with Kinaxo’s chemical proteomics technology platform, KinaTor.

Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) has disclosed that it will make more than €400 million available for grants to the life sciences in 2008, representing an increase of €46 million or 13% from its budget for 2007.

The European Commission is asking scientists, industrialists and members of the public to help it draft a code of conduct for nanotechnology.

Hillary Clinton, the Democrat Senator from New York, has received an honorary doctorate of medicine from Göteborgs Universitet for her efforts to improve healthcare in the US. A ceremony is expected to take place in the United States in the autumn of 2007.

Pharming Group NV said that it has made “important progress” in the process of developing and obtaining registration for its recombinant human C1 inhibitor, Rhucin.

The European Medicines Agency has called for the withdrawal from the European market of the neuroleptic, veralipride, following reports of severe side effects.