Brexit Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. It’s all anyone can talk about and yet nobody can tell you with certainty what to expect. As the UK’s impending withdrawal from the European Union looms ever closer, industry professionals fervently speculate on how it will affect the country’s position as one of the world’s great…

UK One notable quirk of the British life sciences ecosystem is the importance of its not-for-profit sector. Indeed, in 2017, UK charities poured GBP 1.6 billion (USD 2.1 billion) into medical research; more than both the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). Simon Gillespie, chief…

Innovation The new AI tech from Google’s DeepMind can diagnose over 50 retinal diseases with more accuracy than your optometrist. Research conducted by Nature Medicine found that a ground-breaking artificial intelligence system developed by Moorfields eye hospital, University College London and Google’s DeepMind can identify over 50 eye diseases with 94% accuracy. Among the diseases…

China This week, China has fast-tracked approval for 48 “much-needed medicines.” Regulators gave special consideration to new treatments for rare diseases as well as drugs that target serious, life-threatening illnesses, like cancer. Authorities were made to sit up and listen following the box office success of a low budget film called “Dying to…

Pharma What is VR and why should healthcare and pharmaceutical companies take note? VR (Virtual Reality) places the user into a virtual world. VR differs from Augmented Reality (AR), which sets virtual objects against the backdrop of the real world—as in Pokemon Go, the augmented reality smartphone craze of 2016—or simply…

GSK In a pharmaceutical environment faced with stiffening regulatory regimes, and where mergers and acquisitions become more commonplace, GSK’s diversifications and growth model have long come into question. Historically, Big Pharma would work as a one-stop-shop for medicine solutions covering all therapeutic areas, and over the years, companies opened up new…

China One of China’s biggest vaccine manufacturers was found to have falsified rabies vaccine records causing nationwide parenting chaos. Executives from China’s second largest pharmaceutical company, ChangSheng biotechnology (Changsheng literally translates to ‘Long Life’) in Northeast China, admitted to having falsified records for over 250,000 substandard vaccines for DPT (diphtheria, pertussis,…

R&D Portugal has forged a name for itself in terms of early adoption of new technology and ideas; making the country a prime destination for clinical trials as well as a market in which multinational pharma companies can trial innovative new treatments before rolling them out across the continent. “We are…

Biogen After completing Phase II of clinical trials, Biogen and Eisai’s new candidate drug for Alzheimer’s Disease is showing strong potential in a field where research has met relentless challenges and a series of drug candidates have been unsuccessful. Indeed, the failure rate for Alzheimer’s drugs has been 99.6 percent over the…

Digital Surgery By developing the first real-time AI system for use in operating rooms, a British medtech start-up is helping push forward the quality and precision of surgical care, as well as potentially paving the way for many more patients in developing nations to access this care. “The impact of a technology…

Pharma The last few years have witnessed the advent of a highly disruptive business model within the heart of the pharma world that fundamentally reconsiders the manner in which R&D is conducted and, as such, we have seen the rise (and sometimes fall) of a new breed of companies that some…

Novartis In the latest in a wave of Big Pharma companies retreating from the field of antibiotics, Novartis has decided to drop its antibacterial and antiviral early-stage research programs, laying off 140 staff in the US. This comes at a time when antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria – so-called ‘superbugs’ – are…