A long-running lobbying effort has paid off, with the announcement of two U.K. government-backed investment vehicles through which pension funds will be able to invest in early stage private life sciences companies.
Foreign investment in China’s biopharma sector is beginning to pick up after the hit of severe pandemic restrictions, and as Western governments look to revive trading relationships following a spate of diplomatic rows. While the geopolitical tensions remain, the mantra from Europe is not to de-couple, but to de-risk. Following a policy review in 2023, the U.K. government position is that a positive two-way trade and investment relationship with China is “mutually beneficial.”
Ocular gene therapy specialist Pulsesight Therapeutics SAS has launched with seed funding and is raising a series A to take forward two programs using electroporation to deliver plasmid DNA in the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration and geographic atrophy.
Ocular gene therapy specialist Pulsesight Therapeutics SAS has launched with seed funding and is raising a series A to take forward two programs using electroporation to deliver plasmid DNA in the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration and geographic atrophy.
Curve Therapeutics Ltd. has raised £40.5 million (US$51.2 million) in a series A round to take two lead programs toward the clinic over the next three years. Since its formation in 2019, Curve has applied its Microcycle intracellular screening platform to discover a pipeline of small molecules against oncology targets that have evaded conventional approaches.
Chief executives of U.K. medical research charities have issued a call for speedier uptake and more equitable access to new drugs that have received a cost-effectiveness seal of approval from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. In a joint report with the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, the heads of eight charities examined a number of cases where access has been limited and set out recommendations to address the challenges of equity, uptake and health inequalities.
The new director of the U.S. NIH, Monica Bertagnolli, has set out the prospectus for her tenure, saying she intends to apply the agency’s $47 billion per annum budget to reverse the decline in health and life expectancy in the U.S.
The biological processes giving rise to the central nervous system symptoms of long COVID remain a mystery. But multiple studies suggest they do not appear to be a result of a direct viral infection of brain tissue. The latest such research, which appeared online in Nature Neuroscience on Feb. 16, 2024, demonstrated that local immune response in brain tissues persisted long after SARS-CoV-2 virus had disappeared.
The biological processes giving rise to the central nervous system symptoms of long COVID remain a mystery. But multiple studies suggest they do not appear to be a result of a direct viral infection of brain tissue. The latest such research, which appeared online in Nature Neuroscience on Feb. 16, 2024, demonstrated that local immune response in brain tissues persisted long after SARS-CoV-2 virus had disappeared.
Kalvista Pharmaceuticals Inc. is promising to “change the paradigm” in the treatment of hereditary angioedema, after announcing positive phase III data for its oral on-demand kallikrein inhibitor sebetralstat. Rather than waiting four to five hours to self-administer therapy, as is the case for approved injectable on-demand therapies, there was a median time to dosing of 10 minutes after the start of an attack in the ongoing open label extension trial and a median time to dosing of 41 minutes in the 136-patient placebo-controlled phase 3 trial.
