Active pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturer Tetrionics is
planning to double the capacity at a facility in the US to hike its
ability to make highly potent compounds.
Germany's Wacker Specialties has signed an R&D agreement with
Finland's Prokaria to bolster its activities in chiral alcohols,
used as chemical building blocks by the pharmaceutical industry.
Last year, pharmaceutical companies from India submitted a third of
all the Drug Master Files for active pharma ingredients (APIs)
received in the US, outstripping their international rivals by a
wide margin.
German contract ingredient manufacturer Girindus posted its first
profit since it was floated on the stock exchange in 2000 in the
last quarter of 2003, as sales rose 16 per cent to €32 million.
Dr Reddy's Laboratories has developed a new class of therapeutic
that could make it the first pharmaceutical company in India to
develop a proprietary blockbuster product.
MorphoSys has entered into a cross-licensing deal with fellow
German company Bayer Healthcare for technologies used in the
development and production of antibody-based drugs.
Switzerland's Roche is setting up an R&D centre in Shanghai in
a move which reflects the growing importance of the country as both
a market for pharmaceutical products and a site for drug research.
A survey has found that difficulties in swallowing pills is
widespread among adults, but is rarely discussed with doctors and
can prevent some people from taking their medicine. The findings
suggest that pharmaceutical companies should...
A recent trend in drug development has been the re-invigoration of
older pharmaceuticals by developing new versions based on just one
of the two optical isomers of the active compound, a process known
as racemic switching. But critics...
A study which has found significant differences between the adult
and childhood forms of asthma suggests that pharmaceutical
companies may have to rethink their approach to developing new
drugs for the disease.
Dow Chemical has started a new research product, with the support
of the US government, that could hasten the time it takes to make
vaccines in response to a new epidemic or biological attack.
Large Scale Biology Corp has solved the problem of supplying large
quantities of aprotinin - widely used in the manufacture of
biologic drugs - by developing a recombinant form that is made in
tobacco plants.
An ageing drug for asthma marketed by Abbott Laboratories could get
a new lease of life from a revamp using drug delivery technology
developed by SkyePharma of the UK.
Genentech's strategy of expanding beyond its traditional territory
of protein-based drugs and into small molecules was reinforced
earlier this week by its new agreement with Array BioPharma.
Bayer Fine Chemicals has developed a new way to make chiral
epoxides that could shorten reaction times and reduce the amount of
expensive catalysts used in the process.
Researchers in the UK have discovered a protein that seems to play
a key role in repairing the DNA of cells. The discovery could lead
to a way of inhibiting malignant cells from repairing themselves
after treatment, potentially improving...
A collaboration between Switzerland's Genedata and Bayer of Germany
has led to new way of developing assays for antibacterial activity
and accelerate the search for novel antibiotic classes.
A Scottish life sciences company specialising in the development of
bioinformatics software has been sold to QbioCom, a rival firm
based in England, for £1 million.
Virologists in China have said that a man suffering from fever and
a respiratory infection is infected with severe acute respiratory
syndrome (SARS), the viral disease that caused nearly 800 deaths
around the world in the first half...
Near-defunct Scottish biotechnology company PPL Therapeutics marked
the end of a dreadful 2003 with the sale of its cloning technology
which created Dolly the sheep for just £760,000 (€1.1m).
There are fears that a renewed epidemic of severe acute respiratory
syndrome (SARS) could occur in 2004, after initial tests on a
patient with symptoms associated with the disease suggested that
the causative agent was the SARS coronavirus...
France's Nautilus Biotech says that it has achieved a key technical
milestone in a collaboration with Aventis Pasteur, designed to
improve the productivity of the latter's vaccine manufacturing
process.
The international team of scientists working to determine the most
common variations of the human genome have given more details of
the rationale behind the effort, known as the HapMap project, in
the journal Nature (18 December).
Formulation specialist TransForm Pharmaceuticals has licensed a
novel salt form of the antiepileptic drug topiramate to Johnson
& Johnson in a development that provides the first real
validation of its business model.
Germany's third-largest chemicals company Degussa has won the Frost
& Sullivan Product of the Year Award for its L-hydantoinase
enzymatic process for single-step production of L-amino acids, used
in the pharmaceutical, food...
Two US companies have forged an alliance to develop a polymer-based
technology that could be used to shield drugs from inactivating
processes in the body, extending their time in the circulation.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 15 New Molecular
Entities in the current year to 30 September, 2003, setting the
stage to outpace last year's registrations by nearly 20 per cent,
says a report from Cutting...
Welsh company Great Lakes Fine Chemicals has teamed up with Phoenix
Chemicals to develop new, more cost effective processes for the
production of pharmaceutical intermediates.
Australia's Gradipore has brought in external help to find a
solution to the company's manufacturing problems for its
polyacrylamide gels, used for electrophoretic separations in the
life sciences industry.
The amount of pharmaceutical R&D funding headed out-of-house to
research suppliers engaged in drug development work will grow
almost 15 per cent annually for the next five years, nearly double
the anticipated increase in overall...
A US start-up company specialising in biomaterials, 3DMatrix, has
developed a synthetic scaffold product that can be used to create
self-assembling, microscale environments to encourage the growth of
cells in culture.
A team of researchers in Sweden have developed a drug based on a
naturally-occurring protein that could represent a new class of
antibacterial to tackle the growing problem of antibiotic
resistance.
Molecular Probes of the Netherlands, a specialist in proteomics
tools, took the opportunity presented by the Lab Automation Europe
meeting towards the end of last month to launch a range of new kits
for protein, RNA and DNA analysis.
Radleys Discovery Technologies, a UK-based specialist in parallel
chemistry, has introduced a platform to speed up the purification
process after synthesis of multiple compounds.
The pharmaceutical industry is suffering from a raft of problems at
present, from a decline in R&D productivity through patent
expirations and the increasing reluctance of health care systems to
pay for prescription drugs.
A new process developed by RP Scherer promises to overcome the
stability problems that can occur when certain pharmaceutical
actives are formulated alongside fatty acids in softgel capsules.
De Novo Pharmaceuticals says it has refocused its business from
in-house drug discovery to commercialisation of its proprietary
in silico drug discovery platforms, halving its workforce in
the process.
Israeli generic pharmaceutical company Taro Pharmaceutical
Industries has been granted a US patent for a means of dosing
liquid medicines into a spoon without any spillages.
Many drugs cannot be administered orally since they cannot be taken
up in the gastrointestinal tract. All attempts to solve this
problem have thus far resulted in unacceptable risks of side
effects, mainly because the intestinal wall...
It is already well established that microwave energy can be used to
speed up the breakdown of protein molecules by enzymes, the first
stage in protein identification. Now, a collaboration between two
companies is looking to incorporate...
The innovation gap between the EU and the US will not be closed
before 2010 if the present rate of progress continues, according to
new figures contained in the Commission's European innovation
scoreboard for 2003.
German biopharmaceutical company Medigene has been granted a US
patent covering a specific manufacturing process for viruses suited
for the use in therapies and research.
A pilot study supported by the European Commission has concluded
that a lack of access to scientific equipment and technology, and
not salaries, is one of the main factors causing the 'brain drain'
of scientists, often from...
An oral drug developed to treat the common cold that was rejected
for approval by the US Food and Drug Administration last year could
find a new lease of life in an oral formulation, according to its
developer. If this is correct,...
Gaining ground in the billion dollar safety needles and syringes
market US development stage company Maxxon has linked up with Texan
drug delivery manufacturer Globe Medical Tech for a run on millions
of syringes.
InforSense, a leading provider of software solutions for
streamlining life science research informatics, has today launched
the Knowledge Discovery Environment 1,9.
The European Research Council Expert Group (ERCEG), set up under
the Danish presidency to investigate the creation of a new European
body for the support of basic research, has delivered a provisional
verdict in favour of the idea,...
