Pharmaceutical company Almirall, a CataloniaBio & HealthTech member, and biotechnology firm Tyris Therapeutics have announced a new alliance to develop non-viral gene therapies to treat minority dermatology diseases.

Tyris has cutting-edge proprietary technology and will be in charge of generating the drugs through to clinical trials. The Spanish biotech company is funded by Columbus Venture Partners. 

The deal is part of Almirall’s strategy to offer innovative medical solutions for skin health.

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Ability Pharma has signed a €2.45-million investment deal with Chinese company SciClone Pharmaceuticals, which is now a shareholder in the Catalan biotechnology company. 

Collaboration between these two companies first began in 2016 with a licensing deal to develop and market the drug ABTL0812 to treat pancreatic cancer in China.

This funding, along with the €2 million the company raised through a crowdfunding campaign last December, will go to fund phase 2 clinical trials on ABTL0812.

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Photo: Carles Domènech, founder and president of Ability Pharma.

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Josep Rodés Cabau has been named Director of Research and Innovation at Hospital Clinic Barcelona for the next 4 years, replacing Elias Campo.

Rodés is currently part of the hospital’s Cardiology Unit. For the previous 18 years, he was head of haemodynamics and interventional cardiology at the Quebec Heart and Lung Institute, the Canadian benchmark in cardiology and cardiac surgery.

Josep Rodés has set the following priorities: setting up a facility to coordinate clinical studies, consolidating a solid innovation structure, ensuring quantity and quality of scientific production, and promoting young researchers.

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Devicare has announced the first round of investment in the healthcare and life sciences sector in Catalonia in 2021: €2.45 million from Asian Group Advanced MedTech Holdings, which specialises in medical technology for urology.

Other participants in the round include the company’s main partners, EMESA Capital, Joan Knuth and its founder Rosendo Garganta, plus Ship2B through the impact investment fund Equity4Good.

The funding will be used to develop the second generation of Lit-Control®, a non-invasive digitised treatment for kidney stones.

Abel Ang, CEO of Advanced MedTech, says, “We hope to expand the Devicare value proposal on a global scale ...

Ecopol Tech, a CataloniaBio & HealthTech member, has developed nanocapsules to administer drugs to fight lung and breast cancer that help reduce the systemic toxicity of these treatments. 

The new system has been registered under the trademark Ecostratar™ and the University of Barcelona Cancer Cell Biology research group, which is associated with the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), has begun validation in mice. It is expected to move into the clinical phase in 2023.

Ecopol Tech received a grant of nearly €84,000 through the Business Enterprise R&D Nuclis programme from ACCIÓ (Government of Catalonia) for this project ...

Hospital Clinic Barcelona and Bellvitge University Hospital have started using the RAID-CRC test from biotechnology firm GoodGut for early detection of colorectal cancer.

RAID-CRC is a fast, affordable, easy-to-use, non-invasive test and the first to use specific bacterial biomarkers in stool samples. This new, clinically proven method can reduce the number of false positives by 61%, which means those unnecessary colonoscopies don't have to be done.

“With the current healthcare restrictions due to COVID-19, our priority is to identify the patients who would most benefit from a colonoscopy,” explained Dr Francesc Balaguer, head of Gastroenterology at Hospital Clinic ...

NEOS Surgery, a medical technology company and CataloniaBio & HealthTech member, has been received an outright grant for €1.9 million from the leading European programme for funding innovative SMEs, the EIC Accelerator of the European Innovation Council (EIC).

The funding will be dedicated to the clinical validation of the DISC care device, which has been designed based on NEOS Surgery’s know how in the field of neurosurgery to respond to an unmet medical need, lumbar disc herniation. 

The latest call of the EIC Accelerator (previously the SME Instrument) featured applications from more than 4,200 projects from 18 ...

Researchers at IrsiCaixa, a centre promoted by the ”la Caixa” Foundation and the Catalan Ministry of Health, and the Dentaid Research Centre have discovered that cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC) can make COVID-19 up to 1,000 times less infectious. CPC is a chemical component of some mouthwashes.

So far, the antiviral effect has been proven in preclinical studies: the membrane becomes unstable in contact with CPC so the S protein is no longer functional and SARS-CoV-2 can no longer infect new cells. A clinical trial to prove its efficacy in humans will begin soon, led by the Fight AIDS and Infectious ...

Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona and medical technology company Vecmedical presented their Superbox boxes this week, which are used to cover serum, transfusion and chemotherapy bags when used with paediatric patients.

This initiative aims to help give younger patients a more positive experience of their treatment, as explained Dr Pablo Velasco of the Vall d’Hebron Paediatric Oncology and Haematology Unit, and Eunice Blanco, Social Work coordinator, in this article with the newspaper Ara.

Illustrators, photographers and celebrities like Mr Wonderful (Laura de Luque), Pilarín Bayés, Rosalía and the Márquez brothers donated their creations to the project.

The project was ...

The CataloniaBio & HealthTech board and team wish you all a Happy New Year 2021, and especially to the more than 160 members of the association, its collaborators and healthcare and life sciences professionals. 

This is a good time to share the main milestones we’ve achieved and work we’ve done in this year marked by COVID-19, when our sector has been key in helping deal with the pandemic and advance towards an economy and society based on knowledge and innovation.

Peptomyc, a spin-off of the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) and ICREA, has closed its second round of investment for €11.4 million, led by the Italian fund Aurora Science. The operation also involved the CDTI and existing investors such as Alta Life Sciences and HealthEquity, as well as business angels and employees.

This funding will enable Peptomyc, a CataloniaBio & HealthTech member, to advance its lead candidate OMO103 through to the preliminary results of Phase I clinical trials. OMO103 has already been proven safe and to have anti-tumour activity in several types of experimental cancer models. The first ...

Big news for dealing with coronavirus and for the healthcare and life sciences sector in Catalonia: pharmaceutical company Reig Jofre, a member of CataloniaBio & HealthTech, has reached a deal with Janssen of Johnson & Johnson to manufacture its Covid-19 vaccine in Phase III clinical trials.

Reig Jofre has extensive experience in manufacturing injectable and freeze-dried products, both its own and for third parties. In the first quarter of 2021, the company will launch a new state-of-the-art plant in Sant Joan Despí (Barcelona) that will help meet the need for fast, secure deployment of the Covid-19 vaccine. The pharmaceutical company ...

Splice Bio, a CataloniaBio & HealthTech member, has signed an agreement with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in the United States to develop new adeno-associated viruses (AAV) to treat cystic fibrosis. 

The biotechnology firm, based at the Barcelona Science Park, will receive €282,000 in funding and collaborate with the foundations' Therapeutics Lab to advance its proprietary third-generation platform to modify delivery vehicles for gene therapy and better target specific cells in patients' lungs.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is a world leader in research to find a cure to this rare disease that affects over 70,000 people around the ...

Ferrer, a pharmaceutical company and CataloniaBio & HealthTech member, has been granted a €50 million loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB) to develop innovative new treatments in pulmonology and neurology.

The R&D programme the company presented will run through 2024. Currently, Ferrer’s R&D activity is broken down into the Ferrer Advanced Biotherapeutics (FAB), Ferrer Innovation Management (FIM), and digital health and technology divisions.The deal with the EIB reinforces Ferrer’s financial solidity and complements a €220-million funding agreement reached in 2020 with several financial institutions.

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Photo: Mario Rovirosa, CEO of Ferrer.

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Tecno-med Ingenieros has been granted ISO 13485:2016 certification for clinical and regulatory consultancy services, and for implementing and maintaining management systems for quality, training and services associated with the healthcare products industry. The assessment and certification body was SGS.

“We're very happy to be the first consultancy with this specific certification for medical devices in Spain,” says Xavier Canals, director of Tecno-med Ingenieros, on the company's 25th anniversary.

ISO 13485, derived from ISO 9000, was created to support manufacturers and distributors of healthcare products in designing quality management systems that establish and maintain the efficacy of their processes ...

The Directorate General for Research and Innovation of the Catalan Ministry of Health has opened up the phase for consultation on the Strategic Plan for Research and Innovation in Health (PERIS) for 2021-2027 so companies and organisations in the sector can make suggestions and proposals to improve the document.

To participate, sign up for the information session on 16 December at 9 am, where they will explain the collaboration dynamics.

The Government of Catalonia expects to approve PERIS 2021-2027 in the first half of next year, which is in line with the strategy for the European programme Horizon Europe 2021-2027 ...

Publicly traded, formerly traded and about to go public. The latest CataloniaBio & HealthTech Lessons Learned session, held online on 3 December, brought together financial directors from Atrys Health, AB Biotics, Oryzon, Mabia and Vytrus Biotech to share their experiences on the trading floor with other start-ups and companies in the healthcare and life sciences sector in Catalonia. 

The stock market is now the second most popular source of funding among companies in the sector, according to the BioRegion of Catalonia Life Sciences and Healthcare Outlook 2020, and the main publicly traded companies rate the results positively ...

The pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford have announced that their Covid-19 vaccine is safe and effective at an average of 70.4% in asymptomatic patients. Its efficacy is up to 90% depending on the dose.

Preliminary results from the Phase III clinical trial were published this week in the prestigious scientific journal The Lancet. The study involved 11,636 patients from the United Kingdom and Brazil. It is the first peer-reviewed publication of Phase III data from studies on a coronavirus vaccine. 

AZD1222 has been developed by a genetically modifying a common cold virus that affects ...

Cornea Project, a medical technology start-up and CataloniaBio & HealthTech member, has successfully closed an €872,000 round of investment through the Capital Cell platform. Its goal was to raise €700,000

The main investor in the round was Basque company AJL Ophthalmic. Pere del Campo, co-founder and CEO of Cornea Project, still holds the majority share.

These funds will be used to finish development of the firm's point of care platform for non-invasive diagnosis of eye conditions using biomarkers in the early stages, and for clinical validation. Initially, Cornea Project has focused on detecting keratoconus, a progressive, degenerative ...

Regulatory affairs consultancy Asphalion, a CataloniaBio & HealthTech member, has received a medal for its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and sustainability from EcoVadis, the global CSR assessment agency. EcoVadis has audited over 65,000 companies around the world.

Asphalion was rated on a scorecard of 21 indicators in four key practices: environment, human and labour rights, ethics and sustainable procurement.

“We are very pleased to receive this valued recognition from EcoVadis. We firmly believe that sustainability practices are increasingly important and we work daily to improve all aspects regarding this area,” said Asphalion Managing Director Núria Romero.

Asphalion currently ...