Any worries by Promedior Inc. investors after Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMS) backed away last year from its option to acquire the firm were resolved in a big way by last week's news that Roche Holding AG is taking over the company in a transaction valued as high as $1.39 billion. Privately held, Lexington, Mass.-based Promedior's lead asset is PRM-151, a recombinant form of human pentraxin-2 (PTX-2) protein that won breakthrough designation from the FDA earlier this year for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).
Roche Holding AG and PTC Therapeutics Inc. together with their partner, the SMA Foundation, reported success in part two of the pivotal Sunfish study testing their survival motor neuron-2 splicing modifier risdiplam in patients with type 2 or 3 spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).
RNAi specialist Dicerna Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s chief operating officer, James Weissman, told BioWorld that scientists inside and outside of the company have come to believe in what's called "the X hypothesis" in hepatitis B virus (HBV). "My view, though, as a person who has been in the pharmaceutical industry for decades, is who cares, anyway?" he said – as long as the drug works. He pointed out that, with the cholesterol therapy Lipitor (atorvastatin calcium) from New York-based Pfizer Inc., where he served in business development and marketing, "everybody had a different theory for why it lowered the incidence of heart disease. Nobody knew with certainty."
HONG KONG – In one of the latest combination efforts against cancer, Kahr Medical Ltd. is teaming up with Switzerland's Basel-based Roche Holding AG to study the use of the former's lead program, DSP-10, in combination with the latter's PD-L1-blocking checkpoint inhibitor, Tecentriq (atezolizumab), in patients with advanced non-small-cell lung carcinoma refractory to checkpoint inhibitors.
