News Archive

Chief Scientific Officer Prof Dolores Schendel appointed new Chief Executive Officer of Medigene AG

Dave Lemus appointed Chief Operating Officer of Medigene AG and Chief Executive Officer of Medigene Inc. in the United States

Martinsried/Munich, 17 December 2015. Medigene AG (Frankfurt Stock Exchange: MDG1) announced today that the Supervisory Board has resolved important changes and additions to the senior management team to better align the organisational structure with the strategic goals of the company in immuno-oncology and to expand Medigene’s presence in the United States.

Drs. Donald Zack and Valentin Sluch spent 30 anxious days waiting for their experiment to yield results.

They were eager to see if the retinal ganglion cells growing in their lab would turn red, indicating that they’d successfully edited the cells’ DNA. Turning the eye cells red would allow them to be sorted from other cells and potentially provide the key to research that one day could lead to a cure for blindness caused by glaucoma or multiple sclerosis.

Brace Pharma Capital led a $33 million Series B funding in Navitor Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company. Other investors in the funding included Remeditex Ventures, Sanofi-Genzyme BioVentures and an undisclosed individual investor. Existing investors Polaris Partners, Atlas Venture, Johnson & Johnson Innovation and SR One also participated. Vinzenz Ploerer, president and chief executive officer of Brace Pharma Capital, will join Navitor’s board.

May 8 – 11, 2016

ANNOUNCING NOMINATIONS NEW BEING ACCEPTED FOR THE HEALTH DATA LIBERATORS AWARD

The Datapalooza’s Health Data Liberators Award recognizes extraordinary contributions and leadership in the liberation of health data, helping to accelerate the pace and multiply the volume of data available to innovators in order to foster the creation of products and services to improve health and health care. The Award is presented annually and will be bestowed to the recipient at 2016 Health Datapalooza in Washington, DC.

It’s hard to get people to eat right.

Healthy food can be expensive and time consuming to prepare.

Pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline said its majority-owned HIV business would buy drugs at different stages of development from U.S. rival Bristol-Myers Squibb for an initial $350 million.

GSK said the acquisitions would provide ViiV Healthcare, its HIV unit in which Pfizer and Shionogi are junior partners, with new opportunities for growth.

AstraZeneca along with MedImmune, its global biologics research and development arm, announced a range of strategic initiatives to accelerate the delivery of innovative biologics and targeted medicines to patients in China, the company’s second largest market globally and a key growth platform.

The initiatives and investments include a strategic alliance with WuXi AppTec, a leading Chinese biologics manufacturer and contract research organisation, to produce innovative biologics locally in China. Under the agreement, AstraZeneca has the option to acquire WuXi AppTec’s biologics manufacturing capacity in Wuxi City in the next few years through an overall investment approximating $100 million. Prior to that, Wuxi AppTec remains the company’s exclusive partner for R&D manufacturing for innovative biologics in China.

On Thursday, January 14th from 4-6:30pm pm there will be an open house for the spring courses in the “Advanced Studies in Technology Transfer” program at the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences (FAES) Graduate School at NIH in the FAES Academic Center in NIH Building 10.

On Monday, I wrote about a new bill introduced by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) to overhaul the Food and Drug Administration. Among other things, the bill would try to speed up FDA approvals in order to boost innovation and address the current dearth of new drugs in the pipeline.

I was skeptical. In recent years, Congress has passed a number of measures to greatly shorten the amount of time that drug applications languish in the FDA bureaucracy, and that hasn’t led to a lasting boom in new drugs that are significant improvements over existing treatments. So far, cutting through red tape hasn’t ushered in a new age of innovation.

Baltimore digital health company WellDoc plans to push its flagship diabetes management tool nationally and globally following a $22 million financing round.

The Series B round, led by Samsung Ventures with returning investor Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, will give WellDoc the cash and connections needed to scale up its U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved program for adults with type 2 diabetes, called BlueStar.