Pharma News

Scientists from The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) in Melbourne have successfully grown the Wuhan coronavirus from a patient sample, which will provide expert international laboratories with crucial information to help combat the virus.

Tuberculosis kills. When it doesn’t, its effect stays for what is a lifetime. To make things worse, the current approach for treating TB consumes a lot of time. This puts pressure on TB control programmes. Here are some figures from World Health Organization’s website – 1.5 million people died of TB in 2018; an estimated 10 million fell ill with TB worldwide and alarmingly – among the eight countries that account for two-thirds of the TB cases, India has the most number of cases. 

The situation arising out of Novel Coronavirus outbreak in China is being reviewed regularly by the M/o Health and the Cabinet Secretariat.

US Pharmaceutical companies are sending antiviral drugs to China for helping them to fight against coronavirus outbreak, reported by Wall Street Journal.

Piramal Enterprises Limited’s Pharma Solutions business, a leading Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO), announced plans to expand its Aurora facility in Canada with the addition of a new state-of-the-art wing dedicated to manufacturing Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs). A total investment of ~CAD$25 million will be infused towards this expansion.

AbbVie a research-based global biopharmaceutical company, and Allergan (NYSE: AGN), a leading global pharmaceutical company, today announced that Allergan has entered into definitive agreements to divest brazikumab (IL-23 inhibitor) and Zenpep (pancrelipase). These agreements are in conjunction with the ongoing regulatory approval process for AbbVie's acquisition of Allergan.

Veredus Laboratories Pte Ltd a leading provider of innovative molecular diagnostic solutions, announced today the development of VereCoV detection kit, a portable Lab-on-Chip application capable of detecting the Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) i.e. Wuhan Coronavirus, in a single test.

Cue Biopharma, Inc a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company engineering a novel class of injectable biologics to selectively engage and modulate targeted T cells within the body, announced today the publication of research demonstrating the ability of its lead biologic candidate CUE-101 to activate tumor antigen specific antitumor immunity in the peer-reviewed medical journal Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. The manuscript by Steven Quayle et al. is titled “CUE-101, a Novel HPV16 E7 pHLA-IL-2-Fc Fusion Protein, Enhances Tumor Antigen Specific T Cell Activation for the Treatment of HPV16-Driven Malignancies.”

Strides Pharma Science Limited (Strides) announced that its formulation facility at Alathur (Chennai), India underwent a USFDA inspection which concluded with “Zero 483 observations”. This is the second consecutive Zero 483 inspection for the site. The current inspection was a Pre‐Approval Inspection for sustained release class of drugs which is a new dosage format for the facility and is one of the focus areas for the company in the global markets.

PACT Pharma, in pursuit of its vision to eradicate solid tumors using transformational, first-in-class fully personalized NeoTCR-T cell therapies, today announced that it has closed an oversubscribed $75 million Series C financing. This round, led by Vida Ventures, a next generation life science venture firm with industry-leading experience in the cell and gene therapy, also included current investors of PACT.