Author: Peter Mansell

AstraZeneca’s IMED (innovative medicines and early development), unit has launched a web-based open-innovation platform to facilitate research collaborations with other companies, academia, governments and non-governmental organisations.

The Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation, a new public-private initiative between GSK, the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, will apply expertise in genomics, big-data analysis, disease biology and translational medicine in a pre-competitive collaboration aimed at improving success rates in early drug discovery.

Covance is augmenting its global capabilities for outsourced biologics development with new investment in facilities and additions to its biologics team.

Aptiv Solutions, the US-based provider of biopharmaceutical and medical-device development services, has launched what it says is the first statistical software to enable use of surrogate endpoints in expediting interim-analysis decisions during adaptive clinical trials.

While the Canadian regulatory authority, Health Canada, has made efforts to improve the transparency of its drug-approval procedures, clinical-trial information provided in Summary Basis of Decision (SBD) documents is still insufficient to give doctors a reliable basis for prescribing decisions, a new study claims.