Chaos wrought by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. A heavy workload and continuing resource constraints at the European Medicines Agency. Nonetheless, a record number of novel drugs and vaccines were cleared for marketing in the EU last year.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continued in 2021, the off-patent industry stepped in to provide relief in a variety of ways, whether through securing supplies of essential medicines or helping to manufacture and distribute newly-developed treatments.

The Swiss giant is paying up to $1.5bn upfront to get hold of Gyroscope's AAV2-based one-time investigational gene therapy for geographic atrophy, an advanced form of dry AMD that leads to irreversible vision loss.

Novartis’s ligelizumab failed to show superiority over standard of care Xolair, subverting hopeful analyst expectations and changing the firm’s focus in chronic spontaneous urticaria to a BTK inhibitor asset.