British academic researchers have secured 7 million pounds ($11 million) of funding from the country's Medical Research Council (MRC) to investigate a range of potential new drugs made available free-of-charge by AstraZeneca.

The move is the latest example of how the pharmaceutical industry is experimenting with new research models involving greater collaboration with external partners.

The MRC money will pay for work on 15 research projects covering Alzheimer's, cancer and other diseases. Eight will involve clinical trials of potential new drugs and seven will focus on earlier work in laboratory and animal models.

Scientists were encouraged to apply for MRC funding after Britain's second-biggest drugmaker made available a total of 22 compounds. AstraZeneca did initial tests on these chemicals but then put them on hold for a variety of reasons.

Should something promising come out of the MRC-funded work, the financial benefits will be shared between AstraZeneca and the academic institution which made the discovery, the MRC and AstraZeneca say.

Many drug companies are looking outside their own walls for help in developing new medicines and the concept has been embraced particularly enthusiastically by AstraZeneca, which has suffered a lean period of in-house discovery.

Earlier this year, for example, the group decided to slash its internal neuroscience research staff to around 40 from more than 800, creating instead a "virtual" research unit for brain disorders.

Edited from Reuters.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announces it’s cutting about 300 jobs across Canada, most of them in Montreal.

Julie-Catherine Racine, a spokesperson for Pfizer Canada, says the cuts will be spread across several locations, but the majority will be at the company’s headquarters in the Montreal suburb of Kirkland.

“After an extensive and rigorous review of our organizational structure and of the competencies required for the future, I can confirm that Pfizer in Canada has undergone a restructuring in various parts of its Canadian business,” Racine says in a statement.

In total, about 11% of the company’s total Canadian workforce will be eliminated, she said.

The company recently completed a $31.7-million upgrade to its Montreal manufacturing and distribution centre. The Quebec government contributed $2.7 million to that project.

Pfizer employs 2,700 people across Canada, including 1,800 in Quebec.

Edited from the Financial Post.

Israel-based Neuronix, which has developed a non-invasive medical device to help to treat Alzheimer's disease, expects the system to be approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration in late 2014.

The device, which combines electromagnetic stimulation with computer-based cognitive training, is already approved for use in Europe, Israel, and several Asian countries. In Singapore it is approved for clinical trial use and the application for registration of the product is still under evaluation.

"You stimulate the brain on a biological level as well as on a cognitive level," Neuronix CEO Eyal Baror tells Reuters, saying this double approach created longer-lasting benefits.

The device, which consists of a chair containing an electronic system and software in the back and a coil placed at the head, has been tested on mild to moderate Alzheimer's patients who suffer from dementia but are not totally dependent.

The system is in trials at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre. Patients are treated for one hour a day, five days a week over six weeks.

"We see improvement lasting for 9-12 months and the good thing is that patients can return and undergo treatment again," Baror says. "If out of 10 years the patients have left to live we can keep them at home in a relatively mild state of the disease for three, four, five years, it's a lot."

According to Alvaro Pascual-Leone, director of the hospital's Berenson-Allen Centre for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation, brain stimulation - or transcranial magnetic stimulation - involves a very low current applied to a specific part of the brain and is approved by the FDA for treatment of a variety of ailments and diagnostic applications.

"The application in Alzheimer's disease and in combination with cognitive training is novel," Pascual-Leono says.

About 20% of patients experience a mild headache but there are no long-term negative effects, he says.

Pascual-Leone, who is principal investigator in the Harvard trial, says that of 12 patients in the study, six received the real treatment and all showed cognitive improvement. Their improvement was significantly more than the average seen in patients taking just medication, he says.

The study's results will be submitted for publication in the coming weeks and a follow-up study on 30 patients is planned.

Excerpted from an article by Tova Cohen. Click here to read the full story at Reuters.

Officials at Helukabel, a leading manufacturer of cable, wire, and cable accessories, announces that its North American headquarters is moving to a new location in Elgin, IL, a Chicago,IL, suburb. The new headquarters will house U.S. and Canadian corporate, sales and warehousing/distribution operations. Helukabel USA has been in their new facility since the end of October.

“Elgin’s location to one of North America’s busiest transportation hubs has been a great asset to us since we started our operations in 2007. Other than finding a larger building in order for us to keep up with increased customer demand, from a product and customer service standpoint, we felt that staying in Elgin was an ideal fit,” says Marc Luksch, president of  Helukabel USA. “My team and I want to thank our customers for their support of Helukabel over the past five years and we look forward to continuing our efforts in providing them a high level of service and support as we grow even more in the years to come.”

The 40,000ft² warehouse will now carry 3,600 line items in stock. The warehouse will also be equipped with a high-speed spooler for standard size cables and a heavy-duty spooler for kcmil (MCM) size cables to increase the speed with which orders can be processed, packaged and shipped out to customers. Both the larger warehouse and office space will accommodate the current staff and allow for future expansion as the company continues to grow its presence in the U.S. and Canada.