The Challenge of Change - Managing Excipients Control
Colorcon
06-Oct-2004 - The US Food and Drug Administration will start using a risk-based approach for prioritising site inspections for certain pharmaceutical products, the agency has announced in a final report on its current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) initiative.
06-Oct-2004 - BASF has threatened to relocate research into 'green genetic engineering' to other countries if German law continues to restrict R&D into plant biotechnology, with applications as diverse as crop biomanufacturing of proteins and GM foods.
06-Oct-2004 - Becton Dickinson is planning to sell of its Clontech molecular biology business, five years after purchasing it for $200 million.
06-Oct-2004 - Drug maker Samaritan Pharmaceuticals, has entered into a collaboration with Pharmaplaz to produce and supply Samiritan's lead compound and pipeline of drugs that includes treatments for AIDS, Alzheimer's, cancer and cardiovascular disease.
06-Oct-2004 - Franz Humer, president of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations and chief executive of Roche, has issued a plea for a concerted effort at improving Europe's science base at the European Parliament.
06-Oct-2004 - The biotech industry managed to raise almost $6 billion during the third quarter bringing the total raised this year to $20 billion (€16.2 billion), an increase of $3.2 billion from this time last year, reflecting the growing confidence in the biotech sector after a slow summer.
05-Oct-2004 - The first commercial products from chloroplast transformation technology (CTT) looks a distinct possibility after Chlorogen signed a joint development and supply agreement with Sigma-Aldrich to produce four specific proteins in tobacco plants to be used in applications as active pharmaceutical ingredients.
05-Oct-2004 - Drug delivery specialists Merrion Biopharma has announced the opening of new facilities in Ireland, strengthening its position in the $24 billion oral drug delivery market and reinforcing the healthy state of the Irish pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry.
04-Oct-2004 - In a dispute with Stanelco Fibre Optics, Bioprogress Technology has been awarded outright ownership of a master patent giving it exclusive rights to the process of making capsules from non-gelatine materials by means of radio frequency (RF).
04-Oct-2004 - The European Commission has published details of a new proposed regulation aimed at stimulating research into drugs for use in diseases affecting children.
30-Sep-2004 - Chemicals group Lanxess - to be spun out of Germany's Bayer next year - plans to relocate a plant in Texas to China in order to tap into the strong growth in the market for chemicals there.
29-Sep-2004 - The port city of Visakhapatnam in India is to form a 'pharma city' to house bulk drug manufacturers, according to local news reports.
29-Sep-2004 - A new report into pharmaceutical R&D has identified an emerging trend favouring outsourcing of discovery research, clinical trials and formulation manufacturing, providing pressure relief from consistent, high-growth financial returns faced by the majority of pharma companies.
29-Sep-2004 - Ireland's pharmaceutical industry saw a return to strong growth in July, after a lengthy period in which the prevailing wisdom was that the sector had plateaued.
28-Sep-2004 - Germany's chemical and pharmaceuticals firm Altana is considering an acquisition valued at up to €500 million to strengthen its specialty chemicals division, according to chief executive Nikolaus Schweickart.
28-Sep-2004 - Germany's Girindus is this year's recipient of the Product Differentiation Award sponsored by consulting firm Frost & Sullivan for its innovative developments in the commercial production of oligonucleotides.
28-Sep-2004 - This week has seen several companies unveil significant capital investments in new production and research units, and once again production facilities for biological drugs - currently said to be suffering from undercapacity - feature strongly.
23-Sep-2004 - Researchers at Staffordshire University in the UK have come up with a new robotic arm that is fully mobile, has accuracy that rivals industrial fixed robot arms and could cost significantly less.
22-Sep-2004 - Constant innovation in the field of microfluidics and uTAS has enabled lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technologies to successfully enter the mainstream commercial market especially impacting on high-throughput screening of drug candidates, point of care testing and bioinformatics.
22-Sep-2004 - Australia's Boron Molecular has set up a US agent, Boron Molecular that aims to promote and increase the sale and distribution of the company's range of organoboron compounds throughout the US market.
22-Sep-2004 - Switzerland's Serono, Europe's largest biotechnology company, has said it will close its InterPharm manufacturing plant in Ness Ziona, Israel, by the end of year.
21-Sep-2004 - Representatives of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries presented strong opposition to the concept of biogenerics at a recent meeting convened by the US Food and Drug Administration. As expected, their argument centred on the risk that small changes in the manufacturing process can have a dramatic impact on the safety and efficacy of biological drugs.
20-Sep-2004 - News that B-MS has dropped out of an agreement to develop Basulin, an improved formulation of insulin which was the subject of a $165 million deal - including $20 million upfront - between the two companies last year.
20-Sep-2004 - A bitter-blocking ingredient developed by Linguagen has been backed for use in foods, beverages and oral pharmaceutical dosage forms by the country's regulatory authorities.
20-Sep-2004 - Medarex has announced a global collaboration agreement with Pfizer that will provide for the discovery and development of up to 50 antibody products over ten years including the creation of fully human antibody products in a variety of indications that will address several areas of unmet medical need.