January 1, 1970 (Vol. , No. )

Susan Aldridge, Ph.D.

Almac, Northern Ireland’s leading biotech, celebrated St Patrick’s Day with the ‘topping off’ of their new facility in Pennsylvania. VP Business Development Philip Diamond was looking after the Almac stand at the BioEurope Spring exhibition and explained how to shave a whole year off early stage clinical development with their new rapid™ system, a set of solutions they’ve put together with a full service CRO, which gets a lead candidate into Phase I regulatory submission in under 12 months. There’s also progress in Almac’s diagnostics division, putting together a product for lung cancer prognosis and identifying those patients who could benefit from chemo.

Earlier, I caught up with Remy Delansorne, CEO of Hybrigenics, who is excited about a service deal worth 400,000 Euros they have just signed with an EU consortium on drug discovery in inflammation. There’ll be more big news soon, he promises. Another company with new money is London-based Stabilitech who have just raised £3.3 million from new and existing investors to progress their work on vaccine and biopharmaceutical stabilisation technology.

And I shouldn’t forget to thank the Comune di Milano for sponsoring Monday night’s reception and dinner at the splendid Castello Sforzesco where we were treated to a tour of the Egyptian collection. A perfect environment for networking. On the coach back – often where the best conversations happen – I chatted to Ylva Erlandsson from Stockholm Business Region Development about the biotechnology sectors of the Scandinavian countries. She reminded me that next month (April 23-24) is the annual AngloNordic Biotechnology conference in London – I’m saving the date.

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