Bayer (ETR:BAYN) announced that it is entering into a collaboration agreement with artificial intelligence drug discovery company Exscientia to identify and optimize novel lead structures for potential drug candidates in treating cardiovascular and oncological diseases. The agreement, announced earlier this month, is slated to see the companies work together on early research projects combining Exscientia’s proprietary…

Verily, Google’s life science’s sister company under Alphabet (NSDQ:GOOGL), has received an FDA 510(k) clearance to include an irregular pulse monitor in its Study Watch wearable. Pharmaceutical industry giants including Novartis, Otsuka, Pfizer and Sanofi formed a strategic alliance with Verily last year to develop patient-centered clinical research programs using Verily’s Project Baseline evidence generation platform…

European specialist investor Global Healthcare Opportunities, also called GHO Capital Partners, recently announced that it has acquired Ardena — a specialist contract development and manufacturing organization focused on early phase drug development. Financial terms of the deal, announced Jan. 9, were not disclosed. Headquartered in Belgium, Ardena assists small-to-mid-sized biopharma companies, with services spanning the…

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ)  today reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat the consensus forecast on Wall Street, but its sales numbers were slightly off amid declining medical device revenue. The New Brunswick, N.J.–based pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer products giant reported profits of $4.0 billion, or $1.50 per share, on sales of $20.7 billion for the three…

Chemical industry digital supply chain company Elemica (Wayne, Pa.) said recently that it has extended its offerings to the pharmaceutical industry. Pharma companies using Elemica solutions will now benefit from improved collaboration, visibility, quality management, traceability and speed of execution across their global supply chains, according to Elemica. The company has been building digital solutions…

Avacta Group, the developer of Affimer biotherapeutics and reagents, provided an update on the Affimer therapeutics development partnership and license agreement with LG Chem Life Sciences, part of the South Korean LG Group, to develop Affimer therapeutics in several disease areas. Avacta has generated a large number of Affimer proteins that bind to the first…

Optibrium™, BioSolveIT™ and Enamine™, providers of software and services for drug discovery, today announce a three-way collaboration enabling efficient search of Enamine’s REAL Space directly from within Optibrium’s StarDrop™ software. This extension to StarDrop is powered by BioSolveIT’s proprietary Feature Trees (FTrees) technology, to search a gigantic chemical space of over 11 billion readily accessible…

LUNAC Therapeutics (LUNAC), a UK based drug discovery company focused on the identification and development of advanced anticoagulants with minimal bleeding risk, today announced it has spun out of the University of Leeds with £2.65M funding in the first close of a Series A financing round. The investment is being led by Epidarex Capital and…

Turbine, a simulation-based drug discovery company today announced the closing of an institutional financing round led by Delin Ventures. The seed fund will be used to redesign the failure-prone oncology drug discovery process into a series of rational steps facilitated by Turbine’s proprietary human cell model and simulation platform. The company’s first institutional financing round…

Advanced Solutions Life Sciences announced that it won the Frost & Sullivan 2019 Bioprinting Value Leadership Award for demonstrating best-in-class biofabrication, hardware, software and consulting services. Last month’s award highlights global consultancy firm Frost & Sullivan’s view that ASLS develops unique and cost-effective solutions to advance the development of life-saving drugs by way of 3D bioprinting,…

Redesign Science and OpenEye Scientific announced that they have entered into a strategic partnership to integrate OpenEye’s Orion computational platform into Redesign’s drug-discovery platform. Santa Fe, N.M.-based OpenEye makes “cheminformatics” software for drug discovery, providing a reliable application programming interfaces (API) that customers use to build customizable programs and workflows. Its newly released Orion computational…

Transdermal drug therapy developer Dyve Biosciences announced that it appointed longtime Pfizer executive Chuck Harbert to the role of chief scientific officer. Harbert spent three decades at Pfizer, serving as the company’s VP of U.S. exploratory development and strategic planning, among other senior positions with Pfizer Central Research. He is the inventor and co-inventor of 35 pharmaceutical…

Dicerna Pharmaceuticals (NSDQ:DRNA) announced today that it closed a discovery & development agreement with Novo Nordisk (NYSE:NVO) worth at least $175 million to further development of therapies for treating liver-related cardio-metabolic diseases. The two companies announced the agreement on Nov. 18, 2019, outlining the plan to discover and develop the therapies using Dicerna’s GalXC RNAi platform…

Phase 3 cancer immunotherapy company Cel-Sci (NYSE:CVM) announced today that it priced an underwritten public offering of common stock with expected gross proceeds of $5.5 million. Vienna, Va.–based Cel-Sci is offering 606,395 shares of common stock at a price of $9.07 per share to total the $5.5 million before deducting underwriting discounts and other estimated expenses. The…

Sanofi (NYSE:SNY) announced today that it is planning to tender an offer to acquire all outstanding common stock shares of clinical-stage biotech company Synthorx. The agreement and plan of merger between the two companies was announced on Dec. 7 and the offer is being made pursuant to that. Sanofi said it stands to acquire the common…

Biotechnology company Triplet Therapeutics announced that it launched earlier this week with $59 million in financing as it develops ways to treat certain types of genetic disorders at their source. The $59 million includes a $49 million Series A financing round led by MPM Capital and Pfizer Ventures U.S. Co-founder Atlas Venture seeded Triplet with…

Contract research organization Veristat announced today that it completed the acquisition of Catalyst Regulatory Services, a company that provides regulatory support to biopharmaceutical firms, for an undisclosed amount. Southborough, Mass.-based Veristat said Catalyst’s combination of experience and expertise in the regulatory space will help the company implement strategies, applications, submissions and interactions with regulatory agencies…

Mayo Clinic and W. L. Gore & Associates have announced a partnership to develop implantable cell therapies to treat debilitating conditions with no cure. The for-profit company, Avobis Bio, will combine a patient’s own stem cells with bioabsorbable scaffolds to stimulate the healing of perianal fistulas, painful tunneling wounds that affect patients with Crohn’s disease.…

Retrogenix and Resonant Therapeutics recently announced a non-exclusive strategic partnership that will help identify the targets of Resonant antibodies that are targeting tumor microenvironment. Resonant uses its IMPaCT tumor microenvironment models and data platform to discover targets and functionally active anti-tumor antibodies to treat more difficult tumors. Through the agreement, Retrogenix will perform targeted screening…

This article has been updated with comments from an attorney for Genus Medical Technologies. A federal judge has temporarily blocked an attempt by the FDA to regulate a barium sulfate product ingested before imaging as a drug. The decision counts as at least a partial win for Genus Medical Technologies (St. Louis), maker of the Vanilla SilQ line of…

GE Healthcare Life Sciences said today that it has entered into a strategic R&D and distribution partnership with Advanced Solutions Life Sciences — with a goal of personalized tissue regeneration. The partnership with Advanced Solutions Life Sciences is the latest in a string of investments and partnerships that GE Healthcare (NYSE:GE) has been making to further…

Horizon Discovery Group (LSE: HZD) announced this week that the Human Protein Atlas will use Horizon’s CRISPR-edited knockout cell models to further expand the knowledge available in its Cell Atlas program. Horizon specialized in the application of gene editing and gene modulation for cell line engineering. Knockout cell models offer the possibility for an enhanced…

CicloMed (Kansas City, Mo.) has expanded the Phase 1 clinical trial for fosciclopirox, its bladder cancer drug candidate. The trial has been expanded to include patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer who are ineligible to receive cisplatin chemotherapy, the company said yesterday. Researchers have enrolled the first patient at The University of Kansas Cancer Center; the…

Lunac Therapeutics (Leeds, U.K.) this week announced that it has won a U.K. innovation grant equivalent to more than $4 million to develop what it describes as an innovative anticoagulant treatment with minimal bleeding risk. The £3.14 million grant from Innovate U.K.’s Biomedical Catalyst program also went to the Medicines Discovery Catapult and the University…

Researchers in Spain have developed a new genomics tool that can classify how species are related to each other at far larger scales than previously possible and may yield new drugs, materials and foods — and pinpoint strategies for saving species at risk of extinction. Heralded as a “Hubble Space Telescope” of genomics, the technology…