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

Minoryx Therapeutics, a company specializing in the development of new drugs for orphan diseases, announces the start of its pivotal phase II/III clinical trial of MIN-102 for the treatment of adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN), the most frequent phenotype of X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (X-ALD).

The first patients were dosed at the University Hospital Vall d'Hebron (Barcelona) by Dr. Josep Gámez and at the Academic Medical Center (Amsterdam) by Dr Marc Engelen. In addition, recruitment was also initiated at the Institute of Genomic Medicine and Rare Disorders (Budapest) by Dr. Maria Molnar. More patients will be enrolled in several other European countries (United Kingdom ...

The Spanish Bioindustry Association (Asebio) has voted in its new board of directors this week. A total of 25 candidates stood in the election. 

Ferrer, represented by Jordi Martí, will hold the presidency of the board for the first time, although it is the second time in the position for Martí himself (previously representing Celgene). The vice-presidents are Carlos Buesa, CEO of Oryzon Genomics; Carmen Eibe, director of Project Coordination at PharmaMar; and Daniel Ramón, CEO of Biopolis.

The other new members taking up their places on this board are representatives from 3P Biopharmaceuticals, Ability Pharma, Atrys Health, Ayming ...

The new Bitrack System robot for minimally invasive laparoscopy surgery, developed by the company Rob Surgical, has successfully completed its technical validation on experimental models and is preparing for European authorisation and to enter the market by 2019.

Bitrack is the modular, flexible and more economical alternative to the American Da Vinci robot installed in many leading hospitals around the world, including Barcelona’s Hospital Clínic and Vall d'Hebron University Hospital.

The trials using the final prototype were conducted in the new experimental operating theatre at Specipig, a CRO with GLP certification specialising in offering this service to medical technology companies ...

Devicare has signed a participative loan worth €2 million from the Innova Global line by Avançsa, assigned to the Business and Expertise Department, with the option to convert the investment into Series A stock in the mid-term.

With this new economic injection, Devicare will continue the strategic development plan of new medical solutions under the Remote Patient Monitoring concept, which simply and economically places patients at the centre of their own healthcare management, known as patient empowerment, as well as the corresponding clinical studies and trials for the expansion throughout the European and North American markets. Currently, the company has ...

Cebiotex, a CataloniaBio member, has launched a new crowdequity campaign to raise €650,000 through CapitalCell in order to ensure its first drug, CEB-01 for post-op treatment of soft-tissue sarcomas, reaches paediatric oncology.

The campaign is part of a €1.6-million round of funding. The biotech firm hopes this capital will be covered with public and private funds, allowing it to begin phase I/II clinical trials on candidate CEB-01 with 15 patients in 2018, and begin proof-of concept testing for new oncology treatments for pancreatic cancer, liver cancer and brain tumours. “The first licences are expected from 2021, with ...

Enantia, a CataloniaBio member, has launched a new corporate website presenting its R&D services and expertise in chemical processes, solid forms, medical chemistry and analytical support, as well as the MaxPHOS technology platform to offer new chiral ligands, its catalogue of commercial products and licensing-out opportunities.

The strengths of Enantia, created in 2003 as a spin-off of the University of Barcelona and led by Dr Joan Feixas, are asymmetrical chemistry and crystallisation technology to develop new drugs, among other products. Thanks to the founders’ extensive industrial experience, Enantia has become an European benchmark supplier for pharmaceutical, chemical and biotechnology companies ...