GlaxoSmithKline yesterday made a hostile $2.6bn (£1.6bn) bid for Human Genome Sciences (HGS), its long-term partner on treatments including lupus medicine benlysta.

Britain's biggest pharmaceuticals maker, GlaxoSmithKline, has teamed up with Johnson & Johnson and the private equity house Index Ventures to launch a ground-breaking €150m (£125m) fund to discover new drugs.

Free and open access to research, both past and present, is vital to solving global issues

Elliott Advisors, the dissident Actelion shareholder which has proposed six independent directors for the Swiss biotech's board, partially welcomed the company's recent nomination of former GlaxoSmithKline boss Jean-Pierre Garnier and ex-Schering-Plough finance chief Robert Bertolini as board members.

Babies born to women who eat a poor diet during pregnancy are more likely to suffer prematurely from chronic age-related conditions such as type 2 diabetes, say scientists.

The French pharmaceuticals company Sanofi-aventis is to buy the US biotech firm Genzyme Corp in a multibillion-dollar deal it has been pursuing for nine months.

Leading UK neuroscientists today attacked "draconian" funding cuts that could see £4 million stripped from "vital" brain research every year.

George Freeman, the Tory MP and biotech expert, is calling on the Government to open Pfizer's site in Sandwich to venture capitalists and biotech angels in a bid to save as many of the 2,400 jobs, due to be axed when the plant closes, as it can.

Antisoma suffered a blow last night after it revealed that a key acute leukaemia drug had failed in a final-stage clinical trial.

Blind patients suffering from a type of eye disease that strikes in childhood will become the second group of people in the world to receive stem cells derived from spare IVF embryos left over from fertility treatment.

The global biotechnology business model is "breaking down" as investors tighten purse strings and the industry's research base shifts to emerging economies, a report suggests.

Medicines to treat MS, developed in the 1990s, were an early example of the new biotechnology drugs, synthesised in the laboratory. Hundreds are now coming on to the market at prices that make those charged for the MS drugs look pretty small beer. Instead of £10,000 a patient a year we are looking at £25,000 up to £60,000 or more.

Seaweed bread could be the answer to the obesity epidemic, say scientists.