October

October 30, 2009: Movetis has obtained approval from the European Commission for the commercialisation of its lead product Resolor (prucalopride) for the symptomatic treatment of chronic constipation in women in whom laxatives fail to provide adequate relief. Movetis will sell the product in certain European markets and expects the first launch in Q1 2010.

October 30, 2009: MorphoSys AG has formed a new alliance with Daiichi Sankya Company, Ltd for the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies for hospital-acquired (nosocomial) infections. Daiichi Sankyo thus becomes MorphoSys’s first collaborator for HuCAL PLATINUM-based drug discovery in infectious diseases.

October 30, 2009: GeneNews Limited, a company focused on developing blood-based biomarker tests for the early detection of diseases and personalised health management, has announced that its proprietary Sentinel Principle® platform technology has identified complex changes in blood gene expression patterns that were differentially regulated between active and inactive Crohn’s disease. These differentially regulated genes represent potential new biomarkers for assessing the activity of Crohn’s disease.

October 30, 2009: Evotec AG and DiscoveRx Corporation have established a co-marketing agreement for the screening of GPCRs and other targets. Evotec will have access to DiscoveRx’s PathHunter™ and cAMPHunter™ cell lines and proprietary EFC chemiluminescent detection technology for use during hit identification and optimisation projects performed for Evotec customers, using its proprietary high throughput screening platform.

October 29, 2009: Trenzyme’s subsidiary cytobox™ has launched an online order platform for customised mammalian cell lines. Up to five cell lines at a time can be defined and ordered. At cytobox, an optimised cDNA corresponding to the customer’s target protein sequence is generated by gene synthesis and cloned into the ExoIN vector. After transfection into the parental cell line, selected online by the customer, a homogeneously expressing stable cell line is generated using Trenzyme’s validated ExoIN technology.

October 29, 2009: Illumina, Inc has announced its 2010 roadmap for the Infinium whole-genome genotyping platform, offering products capable of analysing up to five million variants per sample. The company has also outlined an ongoing collaboration with leading researchers to select the highest-value markers from the 1000 Genomes Project for the next wave of genome-wide association studies (GWAS). This array content will facilitate testing of new scientific hypotheses, including the impact of rare variants, CNVs, and other non-SNP markers on diseases and traits.

October 29, 2009: Lonza and Alnara Pharmaceuticals, Inc, a pharmaceutical company developing novel, non-systemic orally delivered protein therapeutics for the treatment of metabolic diseases, have agreed to enter into an alliance to manufacture Alnara’s lead product liprotamase, a novel oral pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy (PERT) for patients with pancreatic insufficiency.

October 29, 2009: ChemDiv, Inc’s subsidiary, Chemical Diversity Research Institute (CDRI ), based in Moscow Russia, has been chosen by Viriom Ltd as its service partner for the development of innovative HIV compounds. The programme includes preclinical and clinical studies, which are expected to begin in 2010.

October 28, 2009: TIBCO Software Inc and Integromics, a provider of state-of-the-art software solutions for data management and data analysis in genomics, proteomics and drug discovery, have launched Integromics Biomarker Discovery 2.0 for TIBCO Spotfire®, a new solution providing data access, normalisation, pattern detection, treatment comparison and functional analysis for scientists analysing genomic expression data.

October 28, 2009: Lonza has signed an investment agreement, including a right of first refusal for the commercial production of products, with Cilian AG. The collaboration provides access to a prospective technology platform for innovative applications in the nutrition and biopharmaceutical area.