Merck Serono, the biopharmaceutical division of Merck, announced that its U.S. affiliate EMD Serono has signed a research agreement with Pfizer Inc. and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. The collaboration is focused on the genomic profiling of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) and Lupus Nephritis (LN) patients. The research project will be jointly funded by Merck Serono and Pfizer.

Bayer HealthCare will invest around EUR 100 million to significantly increase the production capacity of its plant in Beijing, China, in preparation for further demand of its products in the country. A respective agreement was signed in Germany on the occasion of the visit of the President of the People's Republic of China, Xi Jinping, by the CEO of Bayer AG, Dr Marijn Dekkers.

AstraZeneca and the Medical Research Council (MRC) today announced that they have entered into a groundbreaking collaboration aimed at better understanding the mechanisms of human disease. The collaboration will see the creation of a joint research facility at AstraZeneca's new R&D centre in Cambridge in the UK.

Novo Nordisk today announces the launch of 'Cities Changing Diabetes', an ambitious new partnership programme to fight the urban diabetes challenge. The 'Cities Changing Diabetes' programme will first be launched in Mexico City with other cities in North America, Europe and Asia soon to follow.

A pioneering public-private research initiative between GSK, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is to harness the power of 'big data' and genome sequencing to improve the success rate for discovering new medicines. The new Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation (CTTV) will aim to address a wide range of human diseases and will share its data openly in the interests of accelerating drug discovery.

Novartis announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Xolair® (omalizumab) for the treatment of chronic idiopathic urticaria (CIU), an unpredictable and debilitating skin disease that is known as chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) outside of the US. In the US, Xolair is indicated for CIU in adults and adolescents (12 years of age and above) who remain symptomatic despite H1-antihistamine treatment[5].

With an investment of more than 500 million Euros at its sites in Wuppertal and Leverkusen, Germany, Bayer will establish additional capacities for the manufacturing of the recombinant factor VIII (rFVIII) hemophilia products that are currently in development. The investigational therapy options for hemophilia patients - a plasma protein-free rFVIII (BAY 81-8973) and a long-acting rFVIII (BAY 94-9027) - are both currently in Phase III clinical trials.