Biologics / Biotechnology

Biotechnology company SolasCure has completed its £10.9m ($13.3m) Series B investment round. The funding round was led by Seneca Partners and also included BRAIN Biotech, EVA Pharma, Jonathan Milner, and Wealth Club. SolasCure’s first investigational product, Aurase Wound Gel, a hydrogel containing an enzyme cloned from medical maggots which aims to accelerate wound debridement, is […]

Mesoblast has resubmitted its biologics license application (BLA) to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval of remestemcel-L in the treatment of children with steroid-refractory acute graft versus host disease (SR-aGVHD).  Survival outcomes have not improved over the past two decades for the most severe forms of SR- aGVHD, a life-threatening complication of […]

Investment in UK biotech has fallen from £4.5 billion in 2021 to just £1.8 billion in 2022, mirroring the global economic downturn impacting all sectors.  However, venture capital investment in the sector was the third-best year recorded for the UK, with £1.2 billion raised, new analysis from the UK BioIndustry Association (BIA) and Clarivate shows.   […]

X-Chem and Sironax have agreed a research partnership, in which X-Chem will use its DEL platform to support Sironax’s drug discovery pipeline.   Through the collaboration, X-Chem will screen its DNA-encoded libraries (DEL) against difficult-to-drug targets implicated in neurodegenerative disease to discover hits. In turn, Sironax will prosecute these hits into transformational medicines for degenerative disease.  […]

Celltrion USA has submitted a Biologics License Application (BLA) under the 351 (a) pathway of the Public Health Service Act for CT-P13 SC for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).  The submission is based on results from the Phase III pivotal data that evaluated the efficacy and safety of CT-P13 SC as maintenance therapy […]

2022 was a complicated year. Global challenges like the Ukraine war and the continued impact of Covid-19 have been felt across the world. And yet it was also a year of incredible innovation in drug discovery, with the potential of new biotechnology beginning to be revealed. Our top 10 most popular online articles for 2022 […]

Biotechnology company Alchemab Therapeutics has been awarded a grant of £1.7 million (US$2 million) from Innovate UK’s Biomedical Catalyst 2022 funding competition, to accelerate development of a first-in-class disease modifying therapy for Huntington’s disease.   Working in collaboration with Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC), Alchemab is carrying out preclinical studies to progress its panel of antibodies towards […]

A project creating a new class of therapeutic proteins to modulate cell signalling has been accepted into the BioInnovation Institute (BII) Bio Studio programme. The project is based on recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and protein design, and uses methods pioneered by David Baker’s laboratory at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design. […]

As 2022 draws to a close, life sciences market analysts attempt to correctly predict what the next 12 months might bring to the drug discovery sector. DDW’s Diana Spencer summarises the key trends likely to impact the market in 2023.  1. There will be greater emphasis on diversity in clinical trials A focus on the representation of […]

Clinical biotechnology company Storm Therapeutics has successfully completed a USD $30 million Series B financing round.  The investment allows the company to focus on discovering and developing novel small molecule therapies targeting RNA modifying enzymes (RMEs) for oncology and other diseases.  The financing was co-led by existing investors M Ventures, Pfizer Ventures, Taiho Ventures LLC, […]