El Parc Científic de Barcelona (PCB) presenta el programa MedTeX especialitzat en l'acceleració d'empreses de recent creació en l'àmbit de les tecnologies mèdiques. En total acollirà 12 empreses, de forma gratuïta, i el termini per poder-hi optar acaba el 30 de març de 2018. 

MedTeX és una oportunitat perquè els emprenedors treballin amb referents del sector per impulsar les seves empreses i assolir els objectius a través de la formació, elmentoring i el networking en l'entorn privilegiat del PCB. El PCB té una experiència acumulada de 30 empreses incubades.

El programa compta amb ...

Biotechnology firm Pangaea Oncology has signed a new contract with German multinational corporation Merck, with a capital injection of more than €260,000. Specifically, Pangaea will conduct several in vitro experiments and analyse the prevalence of various genes of interest to Merck that are associated with drugs the company has in the clinical development phase. The aim is to find drug-use strategies for several subtypes of breast and lung cancer, under what is known as biomarker discovery.

Pangaea will give Merck access to its latest-generation laboratory and data-analysis capabilities to measure the prevalence in patients at its subsidiary, Dr Rosell ...

ProteoDesign, a biotech spin-out from Princeton University and University of Barcelona and member of CataloniaBio & HealthTech, has raised a financing round of 1.7 million euros led by existing investor Caixa Capital Risc and joined by an undisclosed private investor.

The company is developing personalized immunological treatments against cancer through patented technology discovered after more than 20 years of pioneering research in this field. The funds obtained will be used to advance candidates for drugs in the preclinical phase.

Dr. Miquel Vila Perelló, CEO of ProteoDesign, explained in this interview by CataloniaBio & HealthTech that "the conjugated antibodies are ...

The Business Council of the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), which includes CataloniaBIO members, met for the second time on 25 January. This board advises the VHIR directors and trustees, helping them identify opportunities, participate in joint projects and facilitate access to public and private resources.

The board has 15 members from finance, business and biotechnology, including companies and organisations such as Asebio, Fenin, Specific Pig, Grup Ferrer, ”la Caixa” Banking Foundation, AMETIC, Roche Diagnostics, Banco Sabadell, Laboratoris Esteve and Biocat. The board was created two years ago and is chaired by Lluís Bassat. 

The VHIR management team presented ...

Oryzon Genomics has announced changes on its corporate governing bodies. The company has incorporated to its Board of Directors Dr. José Carlos Gutiérrez-Ramos, president and CEO of Synlogic Inc. (SYBX, NASDAQ) as independent director. Dr. Gutiérrez-Ramos is a key addition for the company in its expansion plans in the US market. 

Between 2009-2015, he was group senior vicepresident at Pfizer and head of its research center in Cambridge/Boston. In his current role as founder and CEO of Synlogic he has raised more than 200 million dollars with the participation of specialized investment funds.

In the same meeting of ...

The Hospital Clínic of Barcelona has launched PortalCLINIC, a website with proven and reliable information on health, in order to combat access to health information that is not very reliable, or even alarmist, that people find on the Internet. The content is supported by more than 200 medical and nursing professionals from the centre.

Dr. Antoni Castells, medical director of the centre, is one of the people responsible for presenting the portal, developed over three years and which will incorporate content in Catalan, Spanish and English. The clinic’s managing director, Dr. Josep Maria Campistol, has declared that they hope it ...

Avinent held a corporate day with the team of 260 employees, on January 26th at the Món Sant Benet, where a 2017 overview of business was provided. Also, the company shared the strategy to continue progressing the important challenges in the coming years from the Avinent Science & Technology divisions.

Thanks to stable growth, the group closed the year at around €30 million and will continue to make major investments to develop all its business areas. "People and innovation are the basis for progress," said Albert Giralt, CEO of the company and member of the new board of ...

Telstar has developed a new HVAC control system (Telstar Smart Clean Room HVAC System) that has been proven to keep the optimum quality of the air by an automatic control mechanism in accordance with the GMP environment regulations. Depending on the room grade classification and activity, the implementation of this new system can save over 40% in energy consumption.

The control system has been validated by GAMP 5 which, promoted by the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE), guarantees a good automated manufacturing practice in the pharmaceutical industry.

Telstar is based at the Orbital 40 Science and Technology Park in ...

BStartup10, Banc Sabadell’s investment and support program for innovative and technological companies, will invest in ten start-ups in 2018. The selected start-ups will receive €100,000 in exchange for shares, as well as personalized accompaniment that will help entrepreneurs develop their market and access the following rounds.

The call is open throughout the year and application forms can be submitted through the website.

The other investment engine for round A is Sabadell Venture Capital.

From February 26 to 28, BStartup will be at 4YFN in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

CataloniaBio & HealthTech and BStartup work with various initiatives ...

Minoryx Therapeutics spin off its Site-directed Enzyme Enhancement Therapy (SEE-Tx) into Gain Therapeutics, a new company that will focus on using this platform to identify the next generation of non-competitive pharmacological chaperones.

Gain Therapeutics, funded by private Swiss investors and by the TiVenture fund has its headquarters in Lugano (Switzerland), with a branch operating from Barcelona. Researchers from the Minoryx laboratory at the Barcelona Science Park joined the new spin-off, under the scientific management of Dr Xavier Barril, ICREA researcher and co-founder of Minoryx Therapeutics, inventor of the technology.

More information is available on the Minoryx Therapeutics website.

Photo: Joan ...

Ability Pharmaceuticals announces that the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the phase I/IIa study to assess the efficacy and safety of ABTL0812 in combination with gemcitabine and nab-paclitaxel in patients with advanced metastatic pancreatic cancer at first line therapy and as maintenance after chemotherapy.

This milestone comes after FDA approval of the Investigational New Drug (IND) for endometrial or squamous non-small cell lung cancer last December. In Septembre the EMA had designated it as an orphan drug.

"We are now working with the medical community to start the clinical development of ABTL0812 in this condition" ...

CataloniaBio & HealthTech has chosen its first president and board of directors today, after the merger of the CataloniaBio association of companies and the HealthTech Cluster last December, at an extraordinary members’ assembly.

The candidacy led by Jaume Amat, founder and CEO of Specipig, took 65% of the votes. The other members of the board led by Amat will be Lluís Chico, managing partner at NEOS Surgery (first vice-president); Maribel Bergés, co-founder and CFO of Spherium Biomed  (second vice-president), and Àngel Alonso, CEO of Vecmedical  (third vice-president). The voting members include Isabel Amat (Reig Jofre), Albert Giralt (Avinent ...

Two candidacies will stand in the elections to select the first board of directors of CataloniaBio & HealthTech: one headed up by Jaume Amat, founder and CEO of Specipig, and the other by Albert Gallart, CEO of Grupo Pulso. For the past four years, Amat has been a member of the CataloniaBio board, while Gallart was president of the HealthTech Cluster (the two organisations have merged to create the new CataloniaBio & HealthTech). Voting will take place on 8 February at the general members’ assembly. 

Jaume Amat’s list features Lluís Chico, managing partner at NEOS Surgery, as first vice-president ...

Qiagen, a leading company in the field of diagnostics that employs 4,700 people in over 35 locations worldwide, has agreed to acquire all shares of STAT-Dx with headquarters at the Barcelona Science Park for approximately €154 million.

Investors of STAT-Dx  including  Ysios Capital, Siemens Ventures Capital, Kurma Partners, Gilde Healthcare, Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, Caixa Capital Risc, among others. This operation confirms the great period the biomedical industry is experiencing in Catalonia, "both in terms of investment and in terms of acquisitions" comments Raúl Martín-Ruiz, partner of Ysios Capital and responsible for investment in STAT-Dx. "Our decision to ...

GoodGut has presented positive results for the RAID-CRC test, which will improve early detection of colorectal cancer (CRC). This test yields 55% fewer false positives than screening with faecal occult blood tests. These conclusions are from a multi-centre study with 450 at five benchmark hospitals in Catalonia.

Dr Antoni Castells, co-coordinator of the Barcelona colorectal cancer detection programme, says the new approach would "if these results are confirmed among participants in screening programs we can reduce the number of unnecessary colonoscopies by 32% and detect 59% of precancerous lesions". CRC is the third most common form of cancer in occurrence ...

Gebro Pharma has signed a distribution agreement with Can-Fite BioPharma Ltd to distribute their lead drug candidate, Piclidenoson, for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis in Spain, Switzerland and Austria, upon receipt of regulatory approvals.

"This agreement reinforces our portfolio in a strategic area for us, such as rheumatology. In addition, Can-Fite BioPharma has demonstrated solid capabilities to carry out development," explained Christian Kollenz, CEO at Gebro Pharma.

Can-Fite BioPharma Ltd is an Israeli biotechnology company advancing a pipeline of proprietary small molecule drugs that address cancer, liver and inflammatory diseases.

More information is available on the Gebro ...

Chemotargets, located at the Barcelona Science Park, and the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (FDA/CDER) will work together under a 5-year research collaboration agreement. The primary objective of the agreement will be to assess the utility and performance of the Chemotargets Clarity® intelligence & discovery platform to predict on-target and off-target activities using known pharmacology and safety data from experimental studies of small molecular entities. 

Founded on 2006 as a spin-off company from Dr. Mestres’ Systems Pharmacology lab of the IMIM Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute, Chemotargets offers cutting-edge validated computational ...

CataloniaBio & HealthTech has opened the election process to choose a new president and board of directors to serve the association for the next four years. The candidacies, which must be submitted by 19 January, must include at least one representative of a biopharmaceutical company and one from a medical technology or digital health company. New this year, the president and the first vice-president will swap roles after the first two years in order to make the body more participative. 

The new board of directors will have between eight and twelve members, depending on the candidacy chosen, and will ...

STAT-Dx, a company specialising in the development of advanced molecular diagnostic systems, announces that it has completed CE-IVD marking for DiagCORE®, its fully-integrated Syndromic Testing System. STAT-Dx anticipates the full commercial launch of the DiagCORE® system in Q2 2018 with an initial focus on the European market. 

Clinical data from the evaluation studies will be presented at the 28th European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases conference which will take place on 21st to 24th April in Madrid.

STAT-Dx won the 2017 Biosuccess award of CataloniaBio.

More information is available on STAT-Dx website.

Mind the Byte, a pioneer company in the development of technologies based on artificial intelligence and big data for computational drug design, has acquired 100% of Intelligent Pharma, one of the leaders in Spain in chemoinformatics services for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. Both bioinformatics companies are headquartered in the Barcelona Science Park (PCB) which will help the integration process. Mind the Byte expects to reach €2 million in turnover by 2019.

More information is available on PCB and Mind the Byte websites.

Photo: Alfons Nonell-Canals, founder and CEO of Mind the Byte - © PCB