News Archive

The goose that laid the biotech patent golden egg is in trouble with the U.S. Supreme Court. Ironically, it was the Supreme Court that helped spur the industry with the watershed Charkrabarty ruling in 1980. But what has been giveth, can also be taken away. Beginning with the 2013 Myriad decision, the Supreme Court has stripped back eligible subject matter for so-called “products of nature,” raising doubts regarding whether any significant patent protection is left for biotechnology inventions. The trend continues as recently as June 27, 2016, when the Supreme Court let the Federal Circuit decision in Sequenom stand, resulting in claims directed to noninvasive prenatal screening of fetal DNA remaining a patent-ineligible subject.

New GSK PARADE (patient rheumatoid arthritis data from the real world) app promises to ‘learn from real patients’.

Glaxo Smith Kline has released an app paired with a patient study developed to provide the pharmaceutical company with a wealth of information on how people cope with rheumatoid arthritis and inform new drug development. 

Dreamit Ventures’ accelerator has ditched the demo day, according to Chief Innovation Officer Steve Barsh. That’s not the only change the early-stage venture firm and accelerator has made of late.

The Maryland Technology Development Corp. is giving a total of $800,000 in investments to four biotech companies.

Each of the firms will receive a $200,000 grant through TEDCO’s Life Science Investment Fund. The fund was created to help give startup companies in life sciences fields a chance to have their technology validated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and to help further develop the product.

Maryland may have seen investments from venture capitalists decrease in the second quarter, but a director at PwC says he is not concerned.

Medical science and bio technology has given second chances to so many lives, especially in the form of prostheses. Gone are the days where your life was over if you lost a limb or two. So to honour this achievement in human endurance and scientific method, we’ve made a list of ten body parts that could theoretically be replaced if lost.

Rumors of staff cuts from AstraZeneca’s ($AZN) MedImmune biologics arm are part of previously stated changes and a deeper focus (and a larger cash pile) for its oncology research.

Rumors have been growing that AZ was axing staffers at MedImmune over the past week, but the Big Pharma tells FierceBiotech that this is part of the course originally announced back in its Q1 update in the spring.

Another month, another blockbuster deal in Boston-area real estate.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities has an agreement to buy the eight-acre One Kendall Square complex for $725 million, and it plans to add another building to the nine-building campus of office and lab space, the company disclosed in a securities filing. The complex includes the Kendall Square Cinema and several restaurants in addition to the office buildings.

VLP Therapeutics, LLC. (“VLP”), a Gaithersburg-based biotechnology company focusing on the research and development of therapeutic and preventative vaccines and next generation antibody agents based upon a novel and proprietary vaccine technology, announced that it won a $2.4 million Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program Technology/Therapeutic Development Award #W81XWH-16-1-0330 from the Department of Defense Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program to advance its malaria vaccine development program. 

CHINA is on the cusp of an innovation revolution, with the country’s biomedical and healthcare sectors making great leaps in the last decade. The achievements are quite visible: the exponential growth of publication of academic articles, patent filings, international exchanges, globalisation of new drug R&D activities, and accessibility of new drug R&D technology capability platforms from both China and overseas, just to name a few.