Weekly roundup: Industry events, gender and GLP-1s, highlighting Rare Disease Day

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Novo Nordisk Foundation announced it had awarded DKK 11.8 billion (€1.6 billion) during 2025 to support more than 2,200 projects aimed at improving people’s health and the sustainability of society and the planet. The projects cover the full range of the Foundation’s grant-giving areas, including key topics such as cardiometabolic diseases, antimicrobial resistance, the development of more resilient and climate-friendly […]

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Sector updates in February

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Investment firms  The European Life Science Coalition (ELSC) has launched to strengthen Europe’s VC ecosystem by mobilizing more private and public investments. Created in association with Invest Europe, the coalition brings together leading European life sciences venture capital firms and research institutions including Novo Holdings, Sofinnova Partners, Omega Funds, and Forbion. Quantonation, a Paris-based VC […]

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Hot topic: GLP-1 weight-loss drugs – the gender divide

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Many more women are taking GLP-1 weight loss drugs than men.  That’s the fascinating take-out from a recent analysis of more than 100,000 people taking the drugs privately in the UK, by a think tank called The Health Foundation.  It wasn’t just a small weighting: for every man taking drugs GLP-1s like Wegovy and Mounjaro privately in the UK, four women are doing so.  Now we can all guess why this is the […]

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Weekly roundup: FDA filings, funding rounds and key appointments

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Hansa Biopharma’s Biologics License Application (BLA) for imlifidase accepted by the FDA Hansa Biopharma announced that its Biologics License Application (BLA) for imlifidase has been accepted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The BLA submission for imlifidase is supported by the previously communicated highly statistically significant outcome of the pivotal U.S. Phase 3 […]

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Hot topic: Should we use new antibiotics first?

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Let’s talk antibiotics. Specifically: Is our policy about how we might use new antibiotics, wrong?  A little on background first.  Resistance to existing antibiotics is growing and the pipeline of new ones is thin.  If we don’t get our act together – so the warnings go – we’ll sleepwalk into a post-antibiotic apocalypse, where surgery is a nightmare and a scratch could be deadly.  Current thinking is that […]

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