21 December 2015, Berlin and Munich - ‘VONVENDI [von Willebrand factor (Recombinant)]’, the new drug from Baxalta Incorporated, a global biopharmaceutical company recently spun off from Baxter International, has just been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration. It is the first, and so far the only, recombinant protein for the…
In December 2015, a new drug was approved in the USA for patients suffering from a rare form of von Willebrand disease. Due to an inherited defect, von Willebrand factor in these patients is altered to such a degree that massive and dangerous bleeding can occur. In healthy patients, von Willebrand factor ensures that blood platelets in the…
In our current newsletter you can read about projects that benefit from LifeScience Foundation grants, and discover what a former industry manager who returned to public research thinks about technology transfer. We report on spin-off milestones, including progress in clinical development, new partnerships and fresh funding for imaging methods,…
We’d like to thank all our clients, colleagues and partners in technology transfer, research and industry for the enjoyable and productive collaboration over the past year. Instead of sending Christmas cards, we have decided to support FONMEH e.V. with a donation. The organization works to provide a home for 39 orphans in Haiti. We wish you all a…
The first clinical trial of MSOT, iThera’s innovative imaging technique, has made it onto the cover of the prestigious journal Science Translational Medicine. The study being conducted at Essen University Hospital was designed to show if MSOT can detect the spread of malignant melanoma to adjacent lymph nodes. This diagnosis is crucial for further…
The US biotech company Amgen announced at the end of November that its cancer therapy BLINCYTO® has been approved by the European Commission for the treatment of certain forms of leukaemia. The US Federal Drug Administration gave its approval a year previously. BLINCYTO® is the first drug to be approved from the BiTE® family – a group of novel…
From 40 submitted projects – all excellent, according to the jury – five have now emerged as winners. These were chosen as having the potential to lead to start-ups in the area of personalized medicine. Among the winners is ‘KNOWING - Turning Big Data into Personalized Therapies’, the brain child of Dr Nikola Müller and her team at the Institute…
TechnologieAllianz announced the acquisition of seven new members at the beginning of December, including Ascenion. The association for knowledge and technology transfer now boasts 40 member institutions representing more than 250 universities, research institutions and technology transfer companies all over Germany. Its members work together to…
amcure, a spin-off from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), has received a further EUR 1.9 million funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Ascenion has been supporting the entrepreneurial team from the outset – for example with the structuring of a series A financing under the Spinnovator…
In the past year, Ascenion intensively accompanied the spin-off amcure as part of the Spinnovator programme. This start-up from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) developed an active agent for the treatment of cancer. In model systems, the peptide is not only able to stop the growth of primary tumours, but also prevents the development of…
Ascenion’s portfolio company OMEICOS, a spin-off from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin, has received further funding of approximately EUR 1.7 million from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Together with matching funds provided by the company, the proceeds will help OMEICOS attain…
BigChem GmbH was founded this October to commercialize validated IT products and services developed at the Helmholtz Zentrum München. The research was supported by the Helmholtz Association and European and national projects, including the BMBF GO-Bio award. The central product is a web-based platform ‘OCHEM’ (Online CHEMical database and…
As recently announced by Ascenion’s portfolio company Protectimmun, the three parties have agreed that Janssen will financially support preclinical studies of Protectimmun’s lead candidate for the prevention of allergic asthma. The studies will be conducted at Imperial College, London – one of Protectimmun’s academic partners.
Protectimmun’s…
As a supporter of BioFIT Ascenion cordially invites all its partners to join this partnering event for open innovation, technology transfer and collaborative research in the life sciences, to take place on 1-2 December 2015 in Strasbourg, France. BioFit brings together over 1,300 international leading stakeholders in the sector offering and…
Bergen, Norway (August 27th, 2015) Bergen Teknologioverføring AS (BTO) and Ascenion GmbH have signed a partnership agreement to cooperate in the area of assessing and exploiting research findings. This will help bring BTO in a position to introduce technologies from its portfolio to new markets in Europe. Ascenion will, in addition to offer basic…
The negotiation of a licensing and cooperation agreement between Formula Pharmaceuticals and the Helmholtz Association’s Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) is the latest in a series of commercialization successes for the MDC brokered by Ascenion. The partners will use a gene transfer system from the MDC in combination with…
Ascenion cordially invites technology transfer professionals of all levels, organizations and nations to join ASTP-Proton’s training programmes and annual fall meeting:
On 23 – 25 September 2015, ASTP-Proton offers two professional training courses:
“Fundamentals of technology transfer”, designed for individuals who are relatively new to…
July 2015 saw the start of a Phase II clinical study in South Africa – a tuberculosis hot spot. For the first time, infants exposed to HIV received the new vaccine VPM1002, which originated at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology and is being jointly developed with the Vakzine Projekt Management GmbH (VPM) and the Serum Institute of…
