> Early last week, Revance Therapeutics announced that it had raised $25.62 million in new venture funds. The developer has been working on a new wrinkle therapy that it hopes will be less painful than Botox. Story
> Switzerland's Evolva has struck a deal to collaborate with Roche on new cancer therapies and anti-infectives. "The agreement with Roche represents another step forward in the development of our genetic chemistry technologies," says CEO Neil Goldsmith. "By exploring biosynthetic scaffolds that have many of the "design features" of nature we aim to build a pipeline of novel diverse compounds with anti-infective and anti-cancer effects." Evolva Release
> Anika Therapeutics is buying one of Fidia Farmaceutici Spa's units for $17.1 million in cash and about 2 million shares. Story
> Med BioGene, which is developing genomic-based cancer diagnostic tests, plans to raise $23 million in an initial public offering. Report
> Cancer Research UK says it will conduct early-stage trials of Merck KGaA's experimental cancer drug DI-B4. Story
> Affomix struck a deal to use its technology to generate antibodies that can be used to hit therapeutic and diagnostic targets selected by Kalgene. Article
> Last week Pfizer decided to shutter a late-stage trial of one of its potential blockbuster cancer therapies after researchers determined that a combo therapy including figitumumab was unlikely to hit its primary endpoint as a treatment for lung cancer. Article
> Codexis joined the year-end rush to file an IPO. Article
Pharma News
> Marketing experts say drugmakers played DTC safe in 2009. Big Pharma reduced expensive network television advertising and took a hard look at which brands should get DTC support, Medical Marketing & Media reports. And they reconsidered just how to measure the effectiveness of their consumer-advertising campaigns. Story
> Indian drugmaker Cipla is in talks with multinational and leading generic drug companies, including GlaxoSmithKline and Israel's Teva, to supply generic drugs, its chairman said Monday. Report
> Germany and France are trying to cut back on their H1N1 vaccine supplies. Germany wants to accept only half of its vaccine order from GlaxoSmithKline because the so-called swine flu turned out to be less virulent than expected, officials told Bloomberg. Meanwhile, France is offloading vaccine doses to other countries, citing research showing that the shots offered protection with just one dose rather than two as initially prescribed. Report
> In a move that's sure to be dissected--and possibly imitated--two Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals have imposed new rules restricting outside pay for senior officials. Report
Biotech IT News
> Online drug hawkers have upped their game by embedding MP3 audio clips in their e-mail messages to defeat messaging security filters and e-mail clients. Report
> Version 2.0 of the caBIG open-source Clinical Trials Suite bundles patient, adverse-event, and lab data, as well as clinical functionality. Report
> Cancer systems biology algorithms have led researchers to two genes that collaborate to cause an aggressive brain tumor. Report
> Researchers have discovered and validated a drug target for fighting multiple cancers following the in silico prediction via a Compugen discovery platform for monoclonal antibody targets. Report
> In its effort to crack one of the tougher clinical trial nuts, GlaxoSmithKline has doubled the efficiency of its subject-recruitment efforts. The pharma giant says it averages about 400 subjects at 60 sites, usually in fewer than 10 countries. Larger trials, of course, reach into the thousands of subjects, reports Information Week. Report
> Simultaneous analyses of text and image data are helping researchers probe the intersections between biology and chemistry--so says the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. Report
And Finally... New research shows how it is possible to directly analyze DNA from a member of our own species who lived about 30,000 years ago. Release