GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has today opened a new medicinal chemistry
laboratory in Singapore and plans to double the number of
researchers hired at the site to 60.
A highly-acquisitive and research-intensive year has left drug
discovery services provider Galapagos further in the red at the end
of its 2006 financial year, although sales soared.
Roche is the latest large pharma company to restructure its
research and development into smaller disease-specific divisions to
help get drugs on the market faster.
Caliper Life Sciences is making the most of its recent acquisitions
by launching a new drug discovery and development services business
- created from the integration of two companies it recently bought
- in a bid to offer a "in...
According to a review of public healthcare funding, the current
method of developing drugs is unsustainable and must be updated if
the UK is to remain at the forefront of European bioscience.
Genomics-based drug discovery company Galapagos, has struck a deal
with LEO Pharma in an agreement that will see the firm use its
natural compound collection for high throughput screening, hit
verification, and profiling of selected...
Genedata has formed a new collaboration with Wyeth Pharma in which
the computational biology firm will lend its support to Wyeth's
drug discovery efforts.
According to a new report, pharmaceutical and biotech companies
have not fully exploited the potential outsourcing represents,
having only been adopted to a limited extent to date by companies.
Several drug development companies are implementing leaner business
models, outsourcing nearly all stages of the drug development
process in response to escalating development costs in a move that
is proving increasingly popular within...
With the cost of drug development expected to reach $1.9bn (€1.5bn)
by 2013, the pressure is on to reduce R&D development time and
cost without sacrificing clinical success rate.
According to a senior figure in the outsourcing industry, high
content screening (HCS) is set to overtake current methods as the
preferred technique of generating hits with the greatest interest
coming from the oncology sector.
Drug development company Amphora Discovery has announced it is to
split the company into two stand-alone business units - a
pharmaceutical development firm in California and a contract
research organisation in Durham.
According to the CEO and Chairman of pharmaceutical giant Eli
Lilly, the biomedical breakthroughs that are occurring within the
industry are transforming medicine and promise to ease the
challenges facing an aging population.
A survey has revealed that the pharmaceutical and biotech industry
are currently dominating the outsourcing scene in Europe,
accounting for a quarter of all sub-contracting activity within the
EU.
The rapidly growing market for drug discovery outsourcing services
will increase 15 per cent to reach $7bn (€5.5bn) by 2009, fuelled
by the advancing Asian market, according to a new study by Kalorama
Information, publishing division...
Canada's Allied Research International (ARI) has expanded its Phase
I testing capabilities in response to the continued need for extra
capacity in this area.
Chimatica makes available its range of pre-selected,
target-specific screening compounds that provide new chemotypes and
opportunities for accelerated lead identification and further
optimisation.
Avalon Pharmaceuticals and ChemDiv have revealed details on a
collaboration in which the two companies are to engage in drug
discovery in the oncology sector focusing on small molecules as a
basis for therapeutic development.
A new concept to develop a more accurate method for rapidly
screening chemical compounds has been unveiled, which the
researchers say will significantly aid in identifying leads for
drug development and discovery.
Locus Pharmaceuticals has announced it has entered a drug discovery
agreement with Ono Pharmaceuticals in a deal that will focus on
protein kinases as a molecular target.
Tripos has introduced its answer to rapid in-silico drug screening
with its virtual screening software that uses a fully automatic
flexible molecular docking algorithm to offer speed, accuracy and
usability advantages over current...
A new Phase I clinical services company, Roanoke Clinical Research
(RCR), has been formed to relieve pressure in the biopharma
industry as it continues to face bottlenecks in early stage
research and struggles to move forward fast...
Odyessa Thera has announced it has been granted a US patent for its
single-and multi-colour protein-fragment complementation assays
(PCA), which can be applied to high throughput drug discovery.
Thermo Electron has announced the availability of further
enhancements to its Galileo LIMS, which aims to provide additional
capabilities for high throughput ADMET experiments that facilitate
lead optimisation in drug discovery.
General Electric and MDS Pharma Services announced today the
availability of a new, automated in vitro micronucleus assay that
will form part of a broad panel of drug discovery safety
assessments offered by MDS Pharma Services pharmacology...
According to a new study, efforts to increase R&D pipeline
productivity have never been more aggressive, with clinical
outsourcing being one strategy employed by big pharma to lift
itself out of the doldrums.
Discovery Partners International is offloading its unprofitable
contract drug discovery operations and merging with Infinity
Pharmaceuticals to create a new public company focused on cancer
drug discovery and development.
Drug discovery outfit, Tripos, has announced details of a
collaboration with Abbott, which is to concentrate on chemical
design and synthesis in a deal that mirrors, those announced
earlier in Q1 with Genzyme, GSK Research and Development...
ChemAxon and FMC has announced a global all product license
acquisition of ChemAxon's complete product line and the switching
over to JChem cheminformatics platform.
Bayer Healthcare has selected Genedata's Bioinformatic platform for
its target research and biomarker activities in which the deal will
involve the mechanistic analysis of cardiovascular and cancer
biomarker genes.
Thermo Electron makes available a new datasheet to provide an
overview of the capabilities of its Watson Laboratory Information
Management System (LIMS), which is designed to support drug
metabolism and pharmacokinetic (DMPK) studies...
New data that shows the effectiveness of TTP LabTech's Acumen
Explorer for high content screening at high throughput reveals the
advances high content screening has made in applications such as
protein kinase activation, cell...
Asia and India are continuing to attract a wave of foreign
outsourcing contracts in the pharma industry, as companies are
lured by productivity-and cost savings. However, these countries
are not yet reaching their potential, as fears...
A new report reveals that a lack of validation amongst drug
discovery processes has emerged as a major restraint to the uptake
and penetration levels of computational biology tools in the drug
discovery industry.
A toxicology-on-a-chip tool, which can analyse drug candidates for
toxicity before they advance to pre-clinical stages, has taken one
step further towards commercialisation as the technology promises
to aid laboratory researchers...
Biochip technology has redefined the process of drug discovery with
partnerships central to accelerating adoption levels and expanding
revenues in a market that is reinforced by strong bioinformatics
infrastructure and standardisation...
MerLion Pharmaceuticals has entered into a collaborative agreement
with Astellas Pharma to identify new anti-cancer drug candidates
derived from natural product chemistry.
Angiotech has announced the formation of a drug discovery and
development agreement with CombinatoRx that aims to focus on drug
treatments for peripheral vascular, coronary, and orthopaedic
disorders.
MerLion Pharmaceuticals has entered into a large-scale screening
programme with Cancer Research Technology (CRT) to identify new
anti-cancer drug candidates derived from natural product chemistry.
Increasing adoption of computational biology tools in today's drug
discovery is the industry's attempt to compensate for shrinking
product pipelines as the industry also expects to reduce the
duration of the drug discovery...
According to a new report, the advancement of ADME/Tox technologies
will give rise to considerable time and cost savings as early
screening and increasingly innovative solutions continue to
underline the importance of this technology...
Melbourn Scientific is to launch a new pharmacopeial test facility
providing a range of contract analytical services to the
pharmaceutical industry. The move comes in response to market
demand.
Astex has announced that the United States Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) has approved its Investigational New Drug
(IND) application for the clinical development of its cell cycle
inhibitor, AT7519, for the treatment of cancer.
Nanostream, has introduced a fraction collector add-on to its
Veloce system, transforming it into a front-end sample preparation
tool that lets users rapidly perform MS assays.
According to a recent report, the global bioinformatics market is
currently estimated at about $1.4 billion (€1.1 billion). It is
expected to grow at an average annual growth rate of 15.8 per cent
to reach nearly $3 billion by 2010,...
