Pharmaceutical Market Europe (PME)

1 week ago | pmlive.com | Emily Kimber

Sanofi has announced that it will be acquiring Vigil Neuroscience and its investigational Alzheimer’s disease (AD) drug for approximately $470m. The deal will give Sanofi access to VG-3927, a once-daily oral small molecule TREM2 agonist currently in early-stage clinical development for the neurodegenerative disease. AD is the most common form of dementia, affecting approximately seven million people in the US.

1 week ago | pmlive.com | Emily Kimber

Innovation is driving excitement and opportunity in biopharma. Over the past three decades, there’s been a rapid rise in specialty drugs – growing from roughly ten on the US market to 671 FDA-approved biologics today. In 2024, the European Medicines Agency recommended 114 drugs for marketing authorisation, including 46 new active substances and 15 orphan drugs supporting treatments for rare diseases. These groundbreaking treatments offer new hope for patients to live longer and healthier lives.

1 week ago | pmlive.com | Emily Kimber

Biogen and City Therapeutics have announced a partnership worth over $1bn to develop new RNAi therapies. The collaboration will initially centre on a single target that “mediates key central nervous system diseases” and will use tissue enhanced delivery technologies to enable systemic administration of medicines, the partners said. It will see City leverage its RNAi engineering technologies to develop an RNAi “trigger” molecule combined with Biogen’s drug delivery technology.

1 week ago | pmlive.com | Emily Kimber

Many clinical trials struggle to meet their recruitment targets on time or experience high attrition rates, jeopardising the scientific validity, timelines and financial feasibility of drug development programmes. Moreover, there is concern that engagement with clinical trials may be lower in particular communities. This creates a further challenge of ensuring appropriate representation across cultural, religious and sociodemographic groups.

1 week ago | pmlive.com | Emily Kimber

Merck & Co – known as MSD outside the US and Canada – has shared promising results from a late-stage study of its anti-PD-1 therapy Keytruda (pembrolizumab) in ovarian cancer. The phase 3 KEYNOTE-B96 trial has been evaluating the drug in combination with paclitaxel chemotherapy, with or without Roche’s Avastin (bevacizumab), in patients with platinum-resistant recurrent ovarian cancer.