Merck Archives

News and Trends 5 Oct 2015

Manfred Horst on MSD, Biosimilars, KEYTRUDA and his Company’s rich history

Manfred Horst is a Director Business Development Europe and working from an office at MSD France, the French affiliate of MSD which has its HQ in New Jersey (and is known as Merck & Co. in the US). MSD is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world with a 2014 revenue of €37.4Bn and €6.4Bn […]

October 5, 2015 - 6 minutesmins - By Julie Lellouche

News and Trends 3 Oct 2015

What Happened this Week? Abbvie abandons Galapagos, CRISPR Patent war to end and AI to exploit UK’s 100k genomes

Monday: AbbVie abandons Galapagos phase III and stock plummets 39% (and still dropping) Tuesday: Will Roche lose it’s Worldwide Leading position in Cancer treatments? Wednesday: CRISPR Patent war to End after the Discovery of a New Editing Protein other than Cas9? Thursday: Artificially Intelligent ‘Betsy’ will analyse 100,000 genomes for UK Government Friday: Merck relinquishes Rare Disease license to instead […]

October 3, 2015 - 1 minutemin - By Philip Hemme

News and Trends 2 Oct 2015

Merck relinquishes Rare Disease license to instead focus on Immuno-oncology

Merck has opted to return its Phenylketonuria (PKU) candidates Kuvan and Peg-Pal back to BioMarin from January 2016. Merck will instead focus on other R&D areas, and will receive €340M in compensation (5 times the annual sales of Kuvan) with €180M for future Peg-Pal milestones. This appears to support the back-peddling trend of major Biotechs […]

October 2, 2015 - 2 minutesmins - By Dani Bancroft

News and Trends 1 Oct 2015

Asceneuron’s latest stab at the Alzheimer’s challenge with Sofinnova

Paris based Sofinnova continues to invest in the Alzheimer’s fight, with a €27.5M pot given to Swiss Asceneuron (originally a spin-off from Merck-Serono). Sofinnova therefore joins other investors such as JJDC in the new and optimistic biotech wave of therapies for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). The last decade has been fairly […]

October 1, 2015 - 2 minutesmins - By Dani Bancroft

News and Trends 30 Sep 2015

Apitope relocates to Wales after €12M series B financing round

Now, as we’ve recently discussed here at Labiotech, there doesn’t appear to be many Welsh biotechs…however, this is all about to change, with major Autoimmune disease focused Apitope relocating it’s HQ to Wales. This is following a €12M series B fundraiser led by the Wales Lifesciences Fund for its monoclonal antibody pipeline. Aptiope are currently […]

September 30, 2015 - 2 minutesmins - By Dani Bancroft

News and Trends 29 Sep 2015

Could an Alpaca’s monoclonal antibodies be used to treat an ultra-rare blood disease?

Ablynx‘s Nanobody platform has used the smaller than human monoclonal antibodies from an alpaca to develop the phase III Orphan designated drug Caplacizumab. A phase III study ‘Hercules’ is now pioneering Caplacizumab as the first ever anti-Von Willebrand factor (vWF) nanobody for treating an ultra-rare blood clotting disorder. Caplacizumab is a pioneering monoclonal antibody (mAb) […]

September 29, 2015 - 3 minutesmins - By Dani Bancroft

News and Trends 24 Sep 2015

Crowdsourcing for Innovation: BioMed X has just the right Recipe

Ever heard of BioMed X? If you are curious about innovation crowdsourcing, you should definitely check them out. BioMed X is one of the first companies to use crowdsourcing to discover new innovation in the life sciences, through which a biotech team has been assembled and financed to develop a new treatment for COPD. Chronic obstructive pulmonary […]

September 24, 2015 - 2 minutesmins - By Joachim Eeckhout

News and Trends 3 Sep 2015

Startups receive €25K investment as part of Merck’s brand new Accelerator Program

Merck – the German healthcare company has announced the 3 start-ups it plans to adopt into its in-house accelerator program. Two of the participants focus on e-health, while the third, Sulfotools, has developed a cleaner and cheaper method of solid-phase protein synthesis (SPPS). Merck has awarded these start-ups with a €25K investment as a ‘silent’ investor as […]

September 3, 2015 - 4 minutesmins - By Dani Bancroft

News and Trends 4 Aug 2015

A 100% Successful Ebola Vaccine Available in a Record Time

It’s a really good news in the fight against Ebola. A vaccine has shown 100% success to prevent the disease during the outbreak in Guinea! The vaccine, which has been tested in a record time, can be the key to end the west African epidemics. In an interim analysis published by The Lancet, the new vaccine has […]

August 4, 2015 - 3 minutesmins - By Joachim Eeckhout

News and Trends 28 Jul 2015

Allergan Continues its Serial Acquisitions to be a Giant Drugmaker

With Allergan’s absorption by Actavis last year, we ask ourselves, will the newly formed company enter the World’s Top Ten drugmaker companies worldwide? And it has been very active indeed, expanding its portfolio with several acquisitions. Allergan’s buyout fever is not finished as the company just announced the acquisition of Naurex! It was in mars 2015, when Actavis completed […]

July 28, 2015 - 3 minutesmins - By Philip Hemme

News and Trends 27 Jul 2015

Ablynx and MSD upgrade their €1.7Bn deal to gigantic €5.7Bn

Using camel antibodies as drugs, sounds crazy? Belgian Ablynx is exactly doing that and has been very successful so far. It’s now moving to the next step. It already signed a €1.7Bn deal with Merck & Co. in February 2014 and now upgrades it to a gigantic €5.7Bn! Ablynx is a biotech company developing Nanobodies for immune-oncology […]

July 27, 2015 - 2 minutesmins - By Philip Hemme

News and Trends 14 Jul 2015

Newron’s ressurection story continues with a FDA Orphan Drug designation

New success for Newron Pharmaceuticals. The FDA approved Orphan Drug designation to its new chemical entity Sarizotan, designed to treat patients suffering from Rett syndrome. This decision fits the one from the European Medicine Agency, whose Committee for Orphan Medical Products positively reviewed the drug last month. The Italian pharma company Newron with a market […]

July 14, 2015 - 2 minutesmins - By Philip Hemme

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