Regulatory snapshots, including global drug submissions and approvals, clinical trial approvals and other regulatory decisions and designations: Acceleron, Aeglea, Aeterna Zentaris, Algernon, Bellerophon, BMS, Nicox, Polaryx and Roche.
Clinical updates, including trial initiations, enrollment status and data readouts and publications: Addex, Aivita, Catalyst, Neuclone, Novotech, Obi, Trillium, Viriom.
New York-based Deerfield Management Co. has secured $840 million for a new venture capital fund to support innovations in biotechnology, medical technologies and digital health. James Flynn, managing partner of Deerfield, said roughly half of the fund will focus on early-stage therapeutic R&D, much of that coming from academic partnerships. The remainder will be used to back companies developing novel advances in med-tech interventions, diagnostics and digital health.
Pluristem Therapeutics Inc., an Israeli regenerative medicine company, said several of the seven COVID-19 patients treated with its allogeneic placental expanded (PLX) cells have progressed from suffering severe symptoms of the disease to signs of clinical recovery, including respiratory improvements.
“In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again... The first point is more pressing, but the second has crucial long-term consequences.” So wrote Bill Gates in a February editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine about COVID-19, which “has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about.”
Evercore ISI assembled a dozen internal specialists for a webinar to talk about COVID-19 from a variety of perspectives, with opinions aplenty on transmission route, up-and-coming treatment prospects, and problems in how testing procedures are understood – or not.
As the demand increases for ventilators to treat Americans with severe symptoms of COVID-19, another shortage is being exacerbated – a shortage of the drugs needed to treat patients on ventilators.
LONDON – COVID-19 is posing a real threat to the viability of medical charities in the U.K., which collectively fund 17,000 scientists and invest more than £1.3 billion (US$1.6 billion) per annum in research.