PHARMA TECH
Invitae | September 07, 2021
Invitae , a leading medical genetics company, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Ciitizen, a patient-centric consumer health tech company. Backed by a16z, Section 32 and Verily, Ciitizen is working to build a global platform to help patients collect, organize, store and share their medical records digitally. The acquisition would enhance Invitae's platform by providing patients an easy-to-use, centralized hub for their genomic and clinical information, which together comprise a powerful dataset with the potential to drive research and improve healthcare decision making.
"Invitae is relentlessly pursuing a day when genetics is used routinely to improve healthcare for billions of people around the globe. We believe combining Ciitizen's state-of-the-art, transparent and patient-consented platform with our technologies and services will accelerate our evolution into a genome information company that informs healthcare throughout one's life. This would give us the ability to engage patients, create an innovative patient-centered data ecosystem and deliver better outcomes for everyone. Invitae views the acquisition of Ciitizen as an important part of its strategy to be the industry leader across the genetic testing, software and health information technology spaces," said Sean George, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Invitae.
"Ciitizen has already helped patients take ownership of their medical records to optimize therapy for themselves and contribute their data towards a variety of goals, including research on rare diseases," said Anil Sethi, CEO and founder of Ciitizen. "Patients leave a breadcrumb trail of records behind them, and we believe access to this real-world data is key to personalized therapeutics in the future. The combination of lifelong health history together with Invitae's world-class genetic and data services would enable a digital ecosystem of personalized services for each patient. Democratization of patient-consented data is expected to improve outcomes by providing access to third-parties for whom the patient has granted consent. Unlike many health data companies, we operate on the premise that it's the patient's data, not ours."
Invitae is working to aggregate results from the world's genetic tests into a single, easy-to-use service that makes genetic information accessible to all who can benefit from it - always with patient consent. Over the past five years, Invitae has completed 13 acquisitions that have expanded its testing menu, lowered the cost of its tests, improved its customer experience and enhanced its ability to attract partners. Invitae raised more than $1.4 billion since the beginning of 2021, in part to identify and acquire key assets that bring the company closer to delivering on its vision.
The addition of Ciitizen is expected to empower Invitae to more quickly extend its platform, adding a complementary patient service that streamlines the process of collecting and organizing health information from any source and uses machine learning to transform the unstructured (and largely untapped) health information to enable better care decisions, find clinical trials, and power research using real-world evidence. In addition, as the use of Invitae testing and the Ciitizen service expands, third-party access to consented genomic and other clinical data can be democratized to power a variety of applications that can enhance Invitae's business and growth strategy.
About Invitae
Invitae Corporation is a leading medical genetics company, whose mission is to bring comprehensive genetic information into mainstream medicine to improve healthcare for billions of people. Invitae's goal is to aggregate the world's genetic tests into a single service with higher quality, faster turnaround time, and lower prices.
About Ciitizen
Ciitizen is a patient-centric consumer health technology platform that enables patients to collect, store and share their medical records in a single location. Ciitizen developed proprietary machine learning and AI technologies to abstract critical information from unstructured health records to advance the understanding of diseases, match patients with potentially life-saving clinical trials, and enable better care decisions. Ciitizen also provides valuable big data analytics and data quality technologies to the network of Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) to produce research-ready, regulatory-grade data within minutes, instead of hours or days, and ensure HIEs can comply with the Information Blocking regulations.
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PHARMACY MARKET
Virpax Pharmaceuticals | August 27, 2021
Virpax® Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a company specializing in developing product candidates for pain management, CNS and anti-viral indications, today announced that it has entered into a commercial manufacturing and supply agreement with Seqens, an integrated global leader in pharmaceutical solutions with 24 manufacturing sites worldwide and seven research and development facilities throughout the U.S. and Europe.
The agreement with Seqens provides for both the supply material for Virpax’s clinical studies as well as the long-term commercial supply of MMS019. Seqens will conduct process development and validation of additional large scale commercial quantities of MMS019 at its facilities in Devens and Newburyport, Massachusetts.
“Establishing a collaboration with a strong partner capable of supplying clinical and commercial scale quantities of MMS019 is another important advancement in our MMS019 product development strategy. Seqens has a demonstrated expertise in developing and manufacturing highly-complex molecules for large scale production,” said Anthony Mack, Chairman and CEO of Virpax. “Importantly, we expect this collaboration to support future development and supply additional Molecular Envelope Technology programs under development, including Envelta™ and PES200, our post-traumatic stress disorder product candidate,” concluded Mr. Mack.
About MMS019
MMS019 is a drug product candidate based on a type of nanotechnology that enables the exclusive delivery of a metabolically labile peptide drug into the brain via intranasal delivery. MMS019 is manufactured using industrially relevant equipment and processes (high pressure homogenization and spray drying). There is pharmacological evidence of activity of molecular envelope technology (MET) enabled enkephalin in morphine-tolerant animals. The MET nanoparticles are well tolerated via the nasal route at the dose administered. MMS019 demonstrated comparable preclinical activity to morphine in all animal pain models tested without the drug seeking and tolerance associated with opioids.
About Seqens
SEQENS is an integrated global leader in pharmaceutical solutions and specialty ingredients. With 24 production sites and 7 R&D centers in Europe, North America and Asia, SEQENS develops and manufactures tailor-made solutions and ingredients for the most demanding industries such as healthcare, electronics, cosmetics, food and home care. Driven by a culture of excellence and a strong entrepreneurial spirit, our 3,200 employees are committed to providing our customers with the highest level of service and quality while acting ethically in accordance with our corporate social responsibility program.”
About Virpax Pharmaceuticals
Virpax is developing branded, non-addictive pain management product candidates using its proprietary technologies to optimize and target drug delivery. Virpax is initially seeking FDA approval using its three patented drug delivery platforms. Epoladerm™ is a topical diclofenac metered-dose spray film formulation being developed to manage acute musculoskeletal pain and osteoarthritis. Probudur™ is a single injection liposomal bupivacaine formulation being developed to manage post-operative pain. Envelta™ is an intranasal molecular-envelope enkephalin formulation being developed to manage acute and chronic pain, including pain associated with cancer. Virpax is also using its intranasal Molecular Envelope Technology (MET) to develop its PES200 product candidate to manage post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its MMS019 product candidate to inhibit viral replication caused by influenza or SARS-CoV-2.
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PHARMA TECH
Angelini Pharma | March 11, 2021
Trueblue, a main supplier of AI answers for Operational and Analytical CRM in the Life Science industry reports that Angelini Pharma, as a feature of a significant global computerized change measure, has picked AiDEA, the principal AI-Digital Cloud Pharma CRM arrangement dependent on Microsoft Dynamics 365. Angelini Pharma is a main pharmaceutical organization focused on aiding patients in the remedial zones of Central Nervous System (CNS) and Mental Health (including Pain), Rare Diseases and Consumer Healthcare.
Angelini's new computerized vision is to reposition and lift its Customer Engagement abilities utilizing Artificial Intelligence by actualizing a creative AI-Driven CRM system. This layouts a make way towards Digital, yet in addition the eagerness to go worldwide through accepted procedures that empower connections with key customers while supporting the organization's global development, along these lines advancing its business and operational abilities.
Angelini Pharma will execute the AiDEA CRM suite in excess of 24 subsidiaries around the world, offering its workers a wide scope of Artificial Intelligence applications. The main Pharma Company will accordingly exploit noteworthy bits of knowledge and omni-channel optimization algorithms intended to augment the utilization of assets, optimize Customer Engagement Activities on all channels and better address the issues of every stakeholder.
After an intensive assessment interaction of the ideal accomplice and because of a previous fruitful Data Warehouse and Corporate Business Intelligence project, Angelini Pharma picked Trueblue's, which exhibited the abilities, advancement, adaptability and business benefit of its foundation dependent on Microsoft technologies.
“We decided to boost the deployment of our Multichannel strategy to better support our ongoing transformation, and while advancing significantly, we realized the need to further accelerate also expanding to solutions based on the use of Artificial Intelligence," says Pierluigi Antonelli, Angelini Pharma’s CEO. "Trueblue's AiDEA Suite enables us to leverage our existing investments while accelerating our AI transformation to ensure our subsidiaries can better serve their customers".
On a global level, organizations that are deliberately scaling artificial intelligence report a profit from investment almost multiple times more noteworthy than those that are merely experimenting.
"We are excited about this relationship that has been lasting for several years and that makes Angelini Pharma the main player of a new paradigm, in this particularly important historical moment for the pharmaceutical context," says Marco Bonesini - CEO & Co-founder of Trueblue. "Our goal is to contribute to the growth of Angelini Pharma at international level with the strength of AiDEA and all the potential of an omni-channel AI-Driven solution based on Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is truly ready to change the CRM market in the pharmaceutical sector".
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