Only three years after it was co-founded by Johnson & Johnson, Aliada Therapeutics Inc. is being acquired by Abbvie Inc. in a deal valued at $1.4 billion that gives the big pharma firm another shot at the Alzheimer’s disease space. The all-cash deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2024, will give Abbvie access to Aliada’s blood-brain barrier-crossing Modular Delivery, or MODEL, as well as rights to ALIA-1758, an anti-pyroglutamate amyloid beta antibody designed using MODEL, which is in phase I testing for Alzheimer’s disease.
Kazia Therapeutics Ltd.'s stock shot up 248% on July 10 after the Sydney-based company reported that paxalisib showed a 3.8-month improvement in overall survival, a 33% improvement, for newly diagnosed unmethylated patients with glioblastoma (GBM) compared to the concurrent standard-of-care arm in the pivotal GBM-Agile phase II/III study.
Kazia Therapeutics Ltd.'s stock shot up 248% on July 10 after the Sydney-based company reported that paxalisib showed a 3.8-month improvement in overall survival, a 33% improvement, for newly diagnosed unmethylated patients with glioblastoma (GBM) compared to the concurrent standard-of-care arm in the pivotal GBM-Agile phase II/III study.
One of the challenges in designing genetic and cellular strategies is getting the therapy to the right place. This is even more complicated when it comes to the nervous system. The brain is a complex organ that contains the most differentiated and inaccessible cells in human biology. It is an impassable safe, protected by the blood-brain barrier.
Roche AG acquired global rights to Zion Pharma Ltd.’s lead program, ZN-A-1041, an orally administered selective tyrosine kinase inhibitor that is designed to penetrate the blood-brain barrier and can prevent and treat brain metastases in HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer patients.
Recent studies indicate that the hyperactivation of the PD-1/PD-L1 axis in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) brain has an influence on disease pathophysiology. With this in mind, researchers from Sungkyunkwan University evaluated INR-301, a novel superior blood-brain barrier (BBB)-penetrating anti-PD-L1 antibody, in an AD model.
Whether as primary tumors or metastases, brain tumors remain stubbornly intractable to the progress that has occurred in many other tumor types. As Igor Vivanco, who is a senior lecturer in the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science at King’s College London, noted in his talk at the European Society for Medical Oncology Targeted Anticancer Therapies (ESMO TAT) meeting in Paris this week, the last win in glioblastoma was the addition of temozolomide to the radiotherapy standard of care in 2005. And temozolomide’s benefit is measured in months, not years.