News of the Day

It is almost as if the newly published advice involves a very subtle change focused on Sydney that serves the primary purpose of enabling governments to 'walk back' their previous statements on the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Immutep (ASX:IMM) has announced that its share purchase plan has closed with the company receiving total funds of A$7,175,720 that exceeds the amount originally sought.

Breast cancer screening and diagnostic company BCAL Diagnostics (ASX:BDX) has been listed on the Australian Securities Exchange following an Initial Public Offering that raised $10 million from investors.

Australian biotech company Technovalia has announced that the first volunteers have been enrolled and dosed in the COVALIA trial, a phase 1 study of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, COVIGEN, in healthy participants using the PharmaJet needle-free devices.

In an Australian first, Bupa Dental has partnered with company HitIQ to fit junior rugby players with ‘smart mouthguards’ to monitor head knocks.

Medibank has confirmed a range of support measures for customers living through lockdowns in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.

The vision of the prime minister attempting to so publicly coerce the federal government's chief technical advisory committee on vaccines was ill-considered and completely unnecessary given the wording and obvious intent of its advice. 

On 23 July 2020, exactly one year ago, BioPharmaDispatch asked where is Australia's COVID-19 vaccine strategy? Wind the clock forward to today with a stalling vaccine rollout and it is hard not to conclude that even if there was a strategy it was significantly flawed.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccines are close to as effective against the 'delta' variant of COVID-19 as they are against the 'alpha' variant, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Australian mid-clinical stage antiviral drug development company Island Pharmaceuticals has announced two agreements for the manufacturing of its lead asset.

A new report commissioned by Novartis says change is required to ensure Australian patients are able to access the more than 2,000 cell and gene therapies currently in development with the US FDA expecting to evaluate 10 to 20 each year by 2025.

The European Medicines Agency has started a 'rolling review' of the COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Sanofi and GSK. The regulator said the review will be based on preliminary results from laboratory studies as well as early adult clinical studies that showed Vidprevtyn triggers antibodies against the virus.