If the story by a small, Philadelphia-based company called Avid Radiopharmaceuticals communicated earlier this month holds up, there will be a reliable diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease available in a few years.

Such a test not only would change diagnosis but also help develop novel Alzheimer treatments as it would enable clinical researchers to check whether a drug candidate is making a difference in terms of plaque formation or reduction. At present, the only definite diagnosis of Alzheimer is by brain autopsy.  » Read more...

Alzheimer-specialist Probiodrug AG last week not only obtained a new US patent covering the inhibition of the enzyme glutaminyl cyclase (QC) for the treatment of CNS diseases. The company also announced the appointment of Dr Claus Braestrup, former President & CEO of Lundbeck A/S to Chairman of the Supervisory Board and Prof Dr Lennart Mucke, Director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease in San Francisco, Calif. to its Scientific Advisory Board.  Moreover, the company was awarded the “IQ Innovationspreis Mitteldeutschland” by the Industrial Initiative for Central Germany for its innovative therapeutic strategy to combat Alzheimer’s disease. In May, Probiodrug hosted the PSP 2010 conference with more than 150 scientists to discuss its approach.

- Update Presented at the 15^th Annual Congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA) -

Micromet, Inc. (NASDAQ: MITI) today announced updated clinical data from a Phase 1 and a Phase 2 trial, respectively, of its lead product blinatumomab (MT103). The data were presented at the 15^th Annual Congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA) in Barcelona, Spain.  » Read more...

On June 8, the Society of Investment Professionals in Germany (DVFA) and its Life Science Committee hosted its annual conference which this time focused on biosimilars. The event covered key scientific topics, regulatory pathways and commercial issues of the market.  » Read more...

In a recent article (“Simply Obscene”) the influential German news magazine “Der Spiegel” (20/2010, May 17, 2010) stated the pharma industry was using “with the unscrupulousness of a stock jobber” a loophole in Germany’s highly regulated health care system to charge extremely high prices for basically useless cancer medications. In particular, the article featured Yondelis by Pharma Mar, Nexavar by Bayer, Hycamtin and Tyverb by GlaxoSmithKline, Erbitux by Merck KGaA, Sutent by Pfizer, Iressa by AstraZeneca, Avastin, Xeloda, Mab-Thera and Herceptin by Roche and Alimta by Lilly as examples for cancer drugs providing only marginal survival benefits at enormous costs and stated this was “lawful looting of the health care system”.  The only exception according to the authors of the article was Novartis’ Gleevec.  » Read more...

Please find below a brief summary of upcoming conferences of interest:

June 10-13
EHA – European Hematology Association Annual Meeting

Barcelona, SpainJune 14-17
Goldman Sachs 31st Annual Global Healthcare Conference
Los Angeles, CA, USA

June 17-18
German Electromobility Congress
Bonn

June 22–23
Fifth Annual Piper Jaffray Europe Conference
London, United Kingdom

June 23-24
ChinaBio Partnering Forum
Shanghai, China

June 28-30
Euro Biotech Forum
Paris, France

Hundreds of clinical trials in oncology already use biomarkers to identify patients who have a higher or lower risk of disease progression, as well as help predict how patients will respond to different treatments. However, there has been no systematic overview on the landscape of biomarker use in oncology trials.

In this week’s Science Translational Medicine Robert Sikorski and Bin Yao present the results of their laudable and laborious task to analyse the public database ClinicalTrials.gov for this kind of information.  » Read more...