Those who have taken an interest in Clinuvel will have learned with joy that, on Monday February 6th, the company announced its first official filing for SCENESSE® (afamelanotide) with the European Medicines Agency. It has taken our teams around six years to arrive at this point. Benchmarked against peer companies, it is a relatively swift development path for a first-in-class drug; we first publicly announced our erythropoietic protoporphyria (EPP) program in September 2006. It is an opportune moment to reflect briefly on how we reached this milestone and then discuss the steps that must be taken from here. (more…)
Development of novel drugs is truly like no other business: one attempts to address questions that may have never been previously posed – let alone answered – in the pursuit of improving the lives and quality of life of patients. As I eluded to in my recent 
Stem cells are immature, unspecialised cells which have the ability to develop into other adult cells with a specific function, i.e. skin cells, red blood cells, nerve cells (neurons), etc.
Scarcely a day goes by that the Clinuvel team is not contacted regarding the latest conference: everything from monitoring to manufacturing to marketing is analysed, discussed and disputed across the globe in conference form. It’s impossible – and unwise – for small companies to try to attend all these forums, but it is equally impossible to work in the space without looking outside the office door: there is much to be learned from what others have done or not done to succeed in an industry fraught with failure.
