Australian biotech market today 09.04.09

By Kate McDonald
Thursday, 09 April, 2009

Pharma and biotech are down slightly at 3.30pm today despite overall gains on the ASX.

Genera Biosystems (ASX:GBI) has been climbing well recently. A paper in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine which showed that testing for human papillomavirus was more effective than Pap smear testing in reducing overall deaths from cervical cancer in a massive Indian population bodes well for companies like Genera who are developing molecular HPV tests.

ChemGenex (ASX:CXS) is down 9c to 43c despite news it has managed to raise $10 million from investors here and overseas in addition to a rights issue to existing shareholders.

Pharmaxis (ASX:PXS) is up 15c to $2.13 on the back of yesterday’s good news, while pSivida (ASX:PVA) is up 5c to $1.50 on today’s news that its data safety monitoring board has recommended it continue two Phase III clinical trials for the intravitreal insert Iluvien for diabetic macular oedema.

Cellestis (ASX:CST) lost most of its recent gains, while Clinuvel (ASX:CUV) was up again. Bionomics (ASX:BNO) is up a cent to 22c and Mesoblast (ASX:MSB) is up 10c to 85c.

LCT (ASX:LCT) is up 3c to 15c. The company has recently reported one patient in its clinical trial in Russia has become insulin-independent after treatment with the company’s encapsulated pig islet cells, in addition to a recent report in Xenotransplantation which found that porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) could not be transmitted to primates, a fear many have held over pig-to-human tissue transplants.

CSL (ASX:CSL) is up, as is ResMed (ASX:RMD) while Cochlear (ASX:COH) is down. CathRx (ASX:CRD) is up 7c to 45c.