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On July 19, 2016, Pfizer announced that the World Health Organization (WHO) has prequalified its four-dose, multi-dose vial (MDV) presentation of Prevenar 13 (pneumococcal polysaccharide conjugate vaccine [13 – valent, adsorbed]). According to the company, WHO prequalification allows for the global use of Prevenar 13 MDV by the United Nations agencies and countries worldwide that require WHO prequalification.The MDV presentation of Prevenar 13 offers benefits to developing countries, including a 75% reduction in:

EAG Laboratories announces new company identity and intent to expand testing, analysis, and characterization capabilities across multiple markets.

Patheon launches initial public offering to repay outstanding notes and expenses.

FDA said in briefing documents ahead of a July 13, 2016 meeting that Sandoz’s biosimilar GP2015 has “no clinically meaningful differences” with the US-licensed and EU-licensed versions of Enbrel (etanercept) in terms of safety, purity, and potency.

Biosimilar makers may have to wait an additional 180 days after receiving FDA approval before they can bring their drugs to market, according to a United States Federal Circuit Court ruling. On July 5, 2016 the court ruled in Amgen v. Apotex that after a biosimilar receives FDA approval, companies must notify reference product sponsors and wait 180 days before bringing the drug to market, a requirement in the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act.

The agency says, for now, it’s business as usual.The European Medicines Agency (EMA) says the future location of the agency will be determined by common agreement between representatives of the Member States, according to a July 6, 2016 statement. Until then, EMA says it will be conducting business as usual, and the outcome of the June 23 referendum will not affect the agency’s operations.

The acquisition will give Bristol-Myers Squibb full rights to Cormorant’s HuMax-IL8 antibody program.

Two recently published studies suggest that pre-exposure to the dengue virus (DENV) could predict a person’s reaction to the Zika virus (ZIKV) because of of the antigenic similarity between the viruses. One study was published on June 23, 2016 in Nature Immunology and the other on June 27, 2016 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Dengue and Zika are both mosquito-borne flaviviruses that are cross-reactive.

The companies agree to exchange ownership of Sanofi’s animal health and Boehringer Ingelheim’s consumer healthcare businesses.

A research team associated with Dr. Carl June announces it has discovered a way to engineer a patient’s own immune cells to recognize cancer-specific glycoantigens on tumor cells.

In a lawsuit against Celltrion, Janssen alleges the GE subsidiary infringed one of Janssen’s patents covering the method of making the cell-culture media that HyClone later supplied to Celltrion.

The first-ever use of CRISPR in humans will be evaluated by the National Institutes of Health during a meeting from June 21–22, 2016.

Keytruda was shown to be superior to chemotherapy in the treatment of patients with non-small cell lung cancer.

Results of a Phase II clinical trial reveal that stem-cell transplantation treatment following complete immune system destruction increases the duration of long-term remission in patients with multiple sclerosis.

An article in Nature Reviews Drug Delivery reports the clinical success rates of biologics, and these numbers differ from those recently highlighted in a similar BIO study.

New pharmacovigilance activities seek to support the creation of guidelines for safe switching from innovator products to biosimilars.

A naturally occurring CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) system that specifically can be used to modify the RNA of an organism is the newest development in the technology’s evolution. A new study, published on June 2, 2016 in Science, identifies C2c2, a bacterial protein that can be used as a tool to cleave single-stranded RNA sequences at desired locations.

Sandoz is seeking approval for the same indications as Roche’s reference product MabThera.

In the largest-ever report of its kind, drugs entering clinical development in Phase I were found to have only a 1 in 10 chance of FDA approval.

FDA accepted for review Samsung Bioepis’ BLA for SB2, a biosimilar to Remicade (infliximab).

A new study in Nature Communications explores how to remove the bulk of the soaps that are added to injectables to make hydrophobic drugs more soluble.

The NIH and partners will launch a large-scale clinical trial in South Africa to evaluate the effectiveness of an HIV vaccine regimen

Pfizer will acquire Anacor for $5.2 billion and expects the transaction to complete in the third-quarter of 2016.

The updated guidelines detail best practices for conducting research with human embryonic stem cells.

*Updated May 11, 2016Following JHL Biotech’s opening of a FlexFactory flexible manufacturing facility in Hsinchu, Taiwan in 2014, the company opened a second manufacturing location in Wuhan, China on May 10, 2016. According to the company, with the addition of the new Wuhan facility, JHL Biotech will now hold the largest volume of single-use cell-culture capacity in all of Asia.

The GPhA and its Biosimilars Council expressed concern about the new proposed value-based reimbursement rules for Part B medications.

The companies have agreed to an all-stock merger of equals transaction anticipated to close in the second half of 2016.

AbbVie will acquire Stemcentrx and its lead late-stage asset rovalpituzumab tesirine (Rova-T), a novel biomarker-specific therapy derived from cancer stem cells.