July saw Pfizer’s Asia clinical development head depart and Merck Serono pick a young Taiwanese executive as its president for Japan. Personnel changes also took place at Mitsubishi Tanabe and Zeria Pharma in Japan, and at Servier in China.

Drug development is difficult and risky, and the timescales are long. Optibrium Ltd. has developed StarDrop, a software platform designed to support drug discovery by guiding decisions in the design and selection of potential drug candidates based on complex and uncertain data. Through chemical space visualization, supported by a visualization tool and probabilistic scoring, StarDrop compares candidate molecules against a weighted profile of required properties, and helps users to identify chemistries with a high chance of success in order to better focus their expensive in-house resources.

From its start as a promising powerhouse in the emerging area of regenerative medicine and through product failures, valuation crunches and capital constraints, Curis has in the past two years embraced an almost old-school approach to the biotechnology business. Bereft now of the late-stage assets (and corresponding cash burn) that helped drive its formation through merger in 2000, the company has leveraged its preclinical expertise in cell signaling to sign broad, value-creating alliances with top-shelf biotechnology and pharmaceutical partners.

By combining quantum chemistry and computing power, QuantumBio Inc. says it can model large macromolecules far better and more efficiently than currently available mechanics-based software. The company's tools promise better predictability of chemical and physical properties for virtual screening, QSAR, ADME/Tox, lead optimization and docking.