News

The demerger of GlaxoSmithKline Plc into separate consumer healthcare and biopharmaceutical companies will result in a reset of R&D priorities, a compound annual growth rate in sales of more than 5% over the next five years and a new dividend policy, Emma Walmsley announced. The widely anticipated demerger will take effect in mid-2022 creating a new publically listed consumer healthcare company and a biopharma group focused on vaccines and speciality medicines. The consumer healthcare business is currently 68% owned by GSK and 32% by Pfizer Inc.

uniQure NV is to acquire a France-based gene therapy company whose lead programme is a prospective treatment for temporal lobe epilepsy, the most common form of focal epilepsy. Corlieve Therapeutics SAS has been working on prospective therapies for neurological disorders since its founding in late 2019.

ViiV Healthcare is to make an upfront payment of $40 million to Halozyme Therapeutics Inc of the US to gain access to a drug delivery technology enabling medicines for HIV to be administered in larger quantities and at longer dosing intervals. The agreement was announced on 22 June by ViiV, which is majority controlled by GlaxoSmithKline Plc. Its new licence will give the company exclusive use of Halozyme’s technology for four specific HIV medicine targets.

A Phase 3 study of an experimental gene therapy for choroideremia failed to meet its primary endpoint, and also did not show efficacy on key secondary endpoints, Biogen Inc announced on 14 June. Choroideremia is a rare, inherited retinal disease resulting in progressive vision loss, ultimately leading to blindness.

The Court of First Instance of Brussels has granted interim measures in a case brought by the European Commission and the 27 EU member states against AstraZeneca Plc, giving deadlines for the delivery of specific quantities of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine to the EU. The Commission brought the lawsuit, claiming that AstraZeneca had not made its “best reasonable effort” to deliver supplies covered by an advance purchase agreement entered into by the parties in 2020.

After interim data failed to meet the statistical criteria for success, CureVac NV is pressing ahead to complete development of its first Covid-19 vaccine while making plans to start studies of a second generation compound later this year. On 16 June, CureVac announced that its messenger RNA vaccine, CVnCoV, demonstrated an interim efficacy rate of 47% in a Phase 2b/3 trial. The outcome was weaker than expected.

A combination antibody treatment for Covid-19 has met its primary endpoint of improving  survival in patients hospitalised with the disease, the developer Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc announced on 16 June. The treatment, REGEN-COV, is a combination of the monoclonal antibodies casirivimab and imdevimab, which are both investigational compounds. The US Food and Drug Administration has given the combination treatment an emergency use authorisation.

Stratatech Corp, a unit of Dublin, Ireland-based Mallinckrodt Plc, has received regulatory approval in the US for its treatment for thermal burns. The treatment, StrataGraft, is produced from two types of human skin cells, keratinocytes and dermal fibroblasts, which have been grown together to make a cellularised scaffold. It is a topical treatment, to be placed onto the burn by a healthcare provider.

Flagship Pioneering, a US venture capital company founded by Noubar Afeyan, an Armenian-American entrepreneur, has closed its newest fund at $3.4 billion. Fund VII was reopened in April to current limited partners and new investors, and has now raised an additional $2.23 billion. This will enable the company to consolidate its work in company creation and development under one investment vehicle.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc has entered a new oncology pact in order to complete a group of assets that target receptors transmitting signals to immune cells. The collaboration is with iTeos Therapeutics of Belgium which was founded in 2011 to explore the tumour microenvironment and immunosuppressive pathways that affect cancer.