pharmaceutical

Armo BioSciences only went public in January but it has already been snapped up by Eli Lilly for $1.6 billion. This marks a 68% premium on the closing share price on Wednesday, a significant premium on the IPO price of $17 per share.

Why the rush? Well, its lead drug, pegilodecakin, is deemed to hold plenty of potential in combination with checkpoint inhibitors and this could provide Lilly a gateway into this market, given that it doesn’t have a PD-1/L1 treatment of its own.

Discovering potential therapeutics from natural sources has been a constant throughout the evolution of medicine, Lodo Therapeutics, however, has taken it one step further via its soil-sequencing approach.

The tiny biotech takes samples of soil from various locations across the US and isolates DNA from the soil to discover potential therapeutic effect.

Novartis payment to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had seemed fairly odd from the beginning – with many asking the same question, what was the company paying for?

In a statement, it tried to clarify why a payment as large as $1.2 million, up from the $400,000 previously revealed, over the course of the year was made to the lawyer, who has no background in healthcare, and his consultancy firm, Essential Consultants.

Simon Dingemans has been Chief Financial Officer at GSK since 2011 but has now chosen to retire from the position this time next year.

The announcement marks another high-level change at GSK since Emma Walmsley took charge of the company, with Luke Miels entering the company as President of Global Pharmaceuticals and Hal Barron joining as President of R&D.

Researchers from the University of Manchester’s Centre for Dermatology Research have made a breakthrough towards the holy grail of the cosmetic pharmaceutical market – a treatment for hair loss.

The team found that a drug developed to treat osteoporosis was able to enhance hair growth in the laboratory.

The search to find the treatment began by researching Cyclosporine A (CsA), an immunosuppressive drug that was commonly noted to result in the undesired side-effect of increased hair growth.

Michael Cohen. IMAGE: IowaPolitics.com

Novartis has suddenly found itself embroiled in the Stormy Daniels affair, after the lawyer representing her, Michael Avenatti, included the Basel-based pharma company in a series of payments made to a company set up by President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Avenatti revealed that Novartis had made four payments of $99,980, with the payments ending in January – not long before CEO Vas Narasimhan met with Trump in February.

Mallinckrodt paid $80 million, with a further $345 million dependent on milestones, to acquire InfaCare in the hope that the latter’s treatment for jaundice in new-borns would gain a quick approval.

InfaCare had actually received fast track status for stannsoporfin, based on two Phase 2b trials, by the time the acquisition went ahead; however, the FDA’s advisory committee was less than impressed by the data on show and delivered two blows to the drug.

It is timely to reflect on how we can best implement the revised GVP module (V) concerning risk management in the interests of patients throughout the life-cycle of a medicine.

Factors to consider include:

In the pharma industry, we tend to use a lot of acronyms. Even in every day life, we are shortening our language.

Take for example FOMO, which is “Fear of Missing out.” No one wants to be left out, and that’s why I want to invite you to a major industry conference on 10-12 June.