Biotechnology company ScinoPharm Taiwan Ltd (台灣神隆) yesterday announced plans to form a joint venture with Foresee Pharmaceutical Inc of the US to develop new drugs to treat prostate cancer.
The company said it would invest US$3.6 million for a 15 percent share in the new venture. The drug will enter the third phase of clinical trials this year and commercial sales in the US could start within four years.
“The drugs we aim to develop will have high entry barriers and offer high profit margins. We will not develop drugs that cannot be put on the market within four years,” ScinoPharm president and CEO Jo Shen (馬海怡) told an investors’ conference.
The market for prostate caner drugs is estimated at about US$2.6 billion a year, Shen said.
Shen said there are about 2 million men who have prostrate cancer in the US, and the number is forecast to rise by 240,000 per year.
Prostate cancer is the second most common cause of death among all cancers for males in the US.
ScinoPharm Taiwan also released estimates of last year’s earnings, with pretax profit estimated to have grown 16.8 percent to a record NT$1.37 billion, or NT$2.15 per share, from NT$1.14 billion, or NT$1.84 per share, in 2011.
ScinoPharm chief financial officer Patricia Chou (周珮芬) attributed the strong financial results to better-than-expected sales of company drug Vilazodone, which is used to treat depression.
Growth was also driven by its supply of raw materials to manufacture Qsymia, which was launched by VIVUS Inc last year in the US to help people lose weight, Chou said.
Shen said the company was looking to expand to Japan and China.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained