Avian flu pandemic news from FierceBiotech

Clinical trial designers might want to pay extra attention to the travails at BioCryst. A mid-stage study of its lead therapy, the experimental flu med Peramivir, Read more...

> Pharmaxis says that a late-stage study of its experimental drug for a chronic lung condition demonstrated its effectiveness. Read more...

> Canada's Aegera Therapeutics has raised $21 million in the first close of its third round of financing. The round includes $14 million in venture equity and $7 million in venture debt. Report

> Metrics: There have been $16.6 billion worth of mergers and acquisitions in biotech since July, compared to $2.6 billion in the first half of the year. …

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The World Health Organization is warning governments around the globe that they need to invest another $10 billion if they expect to be able to stockpile enough vaccines to ward off a global bird flu pandemic. The WHO's global plan also calls for a big increase in seasonal flu vaccine production in order to expand vaccine production capacity and long-term R&D efforts to build better pandemic vaccines.

WHO would like to see annual production of seasonal vaccines boosted from 350 …

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> Pharmacopeia Drug Discovery is gaining new research funds from an extension of its development pact with Schering-Plough. Schering-Plough is funding 10 full-time researchers along with milestones for new drug candidates. The collaboration is being extended to April 2007. Report

> Serono announced that new data shows that a new formulation of its bestselling Rebiff for MS shows that it has improved …

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> Serono has signed a development and commercialization pact with Syntonix Pharmaceuticals for its FSH:Fc candidates to treat infertility. Syntonix gains a collaboration fee and will stand to earn up to $54 million in milestones if Serono exercises its option in the deal. Report

> You can add the name of Sanofi-Aventis to the growing list of potential suitors for Bristol-Myers Squibb. …

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China's Sinovac Biotech says it plans to ramp up mass production of a new bird flu vaccine after its first clinical trial found no adverse reactions among the 120 participants in the study. Sinovac says it expects to produce 20 million doses of the vaccine annually within a few years. "These results indicate that we should expand our production capabilities to prepare for mass production of the vaccine against a possible bird flu pandemic," a company spokesperson was quoted as saying by …

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A new study by the World Health Organization concludes that the number of avian flu cases is likely to spike again this winter as the average age of the victims who die of the virus slowly drops. Overall, bird flu killed 56 percent of the people who caught it, with most falling in the age range of 10 to 19. The virus is difficult to catch, the report adds, but notes that with the H5N1 virus widely spread in poultry, the chances of it mutating into a form that can trigger a human pandemic …

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A new federal rule allows health officials to use experimental tests to determine why patients are ill during a public health emergency without the patient's permission. The rule allows labs to run blood and other tests in the event of a bioterror attack, bird flu pandemic or dirty bomb attack. But patient advocates maintain that labs are left to decide for themselves what constitutes a public health emergency, raising the prospect that conflicts of interest may play a role in their …

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Five pharmaceutical companies won a billion dollars worth of government contracts in the race to develop new technology to make flu vaccines needed to combat a human pandemic. U.S.-based MedImmune and DynPort Vaccine along with Europe's GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Solvay Pharmaceuticals will divvy up the money. Novartis plans to do its vaccine work at the newly acquired Chiron facilities in California.

For MedImmune, it's a welcome bit of good news for its beleaguered FluMist …

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