French consortium Booster is developing a personalized emergency treatment of ischemic stroke in its work on brain clot personalized therapeutic strategies for stroke emergent reperfusion. The aim is to refine the patient prognosis based on blood clot clinical and radiological characteristics and propose more effective drug treatments with a new generation of intracranial stents.
The European Commission (EC) has proposed to extend compliance deadlines under the Medical Device Regulation (MDR) to 2027 for high-risk devices and to 2028 for low- and moderate-risk devices, seemingly providing some critical breathing room for manufacturers and patients alike. However, the proposal requires that manufacturers have an application on file for their legacy device by May 2024, suggesting that manufacturers will still face a crippling backlog in obtaining contracts with notified bodies to process these applications.
Transgene SA has received clinical trial application (CTA) approval from the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM) to proceed with a phase I trial of TG-6050, a novel oncolytic virus (OV) for intravenous administration in patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Enrollment is expected to open in the first half of this year.
The European Union’s (EU) Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) drew a fair amount of criticism when it was first released, but Team-NB, the association of notified bodies (NBs) for the EU, has weighed in with some less than flattering observations. The group’s position paper on the legislation said that the act would not only up-classify some artificial intelligence algorithms to a higher risk class but would also resurrect the backlog of applications because of burdensome new requirements for NBs, thus exacerbating an existing crisis of med tech availability in the EU.
Biontech SE is piggybacking on the U.K.’s lead in implementing cancer genomics in routine health care to set up a national clinical trial of personalized mRNA cancer vaccines that are based on the mutational landscape of individual tumors.
The EMA will require all new clinical trial applications to be submitted via its clinical trials information system after Jan. 31, 2023, despite pharma companies and other users raising concerns about functionality and technical failures they are experiencing with the system.
For European biotechnology, 2022 was a year of contraction. Disclosed equity investments in European firms engaged in the discovery and development of therapeutics totaled $6.782 billion, down 55% on the previous year’s record-breaking tally of $15.193 billion. Last year’s tally is the worst performance since 2017 and is well below the totals achieved during the two years immediately preceding the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered a boom in biotech investing.
A surgical team from the Curie-Montsouris Chest Center in Paris, has successfully performed thermal ablation of a metastatic lung lesion using microwaves via a computer tomography (CT)-guided endobronchial approach.
Bottneuro AG closed the first tranche of a bridge round, bringing its total capital raise in 2022 to $4.3 million. This is being used to develop its noninvasive, domestic therapy for treating early moderate-stage Alzheimer’s patients.
The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Agency (MHRA) reported a trio of research projects as part of a push to maintain its reputation as a leading regulator of drugs and medical devices now the U.K. is no longer part of EU regulatory systems, and to attract clinical trials - and the associated inward investment - despite no longer offering access to the EU single market.