LONDON – Four decades of academic research at the University of California, San Francisco, is to be translated through to the clinic with funding from a €1 million (US$1.2 million) European Commission grant. The money, awarded to a Dutch/German consortium will fund the generation and optimization of antibodies designed to neutralize oxidized phospholipids that mediate inflammatory changes in a swathe of diseases. The consortium that won the Eurostars award is led by Oxitope Pharma BV.
When James Peyer, Cambrian Biopharma Inc.’s CEO, watched his grandfather fail every cancer treatment and eventually pass away, he came to a realization that now forms the backbone of his company. “The more I learned about cancer, the more convinced I became that we were approaching cancer as a disease in the wrong way,” Peyer told BioWorld. “We were waiting until people were sick and only then doing something about it.” Cambrian just closed on an oversubscribed series C that brought in $100 million to develop a pipeline of therapies designed to treat and prevent age-related diseases.
Omeros Corp.’s complete response letter (CRL) from the FDA regarding its BLA for narsoplimab did not come as much of a surprise to Wall Street, but still was enough to drive shares (NASDAQ:OMER) down 26.6% to close Oct. 18 at $5.67, a loss of $2.06.
Less than two weeks after Japan’s MHLW became the first regulatory agency to clear avacopan for anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis, the FDA has followed suit. It cleared the oral, small-molecule C5aR antagonist for use as an adjunct therapy for adults with the two main forms of the rare autoimmune renal disease, granulomatosis with polyangiitis and microscopic polyangiitis, in combination with standard therapy.
Voyager Therapeutics Inc. is getting $30 million up front in a potential $630 million gene therapy deal with Pfizer Inc., the company’s first such agreement since a strategic refocusing effort earlier this year and a much-needed endorsement of a next-generation AAV capsid platform that has shown promising though early stage data.
DUBLIN – Treefrog Therapeutics SA closed a $75 million series B round this week, which will help to increase its reach and its profile, as it pursues its highly ambitious objective to drive the adoption of a new way of making induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) at scale. The Bordeaux, France-based firm is not a CDMO in any sense, however. It is a fully fledged biotech, with early stage iPSC-based programs in Parkinson’s disease, cardiovascular disease and bone marrow transplant, among others. It’s just that it is also attempting to revolutionize how those cells are cultivated before it administers them as therapies.
In Cell Metabolism, researchers working at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center reported that when fat cells (adipocytes) are chronically stressed, as is characteristic of obesity, they can release small vesicle exosomes that are respiration-competent and essentially portions of mitochondria.
DUBLIN – Cardior Pharmaceuticals GmbH has closed a €64 million (US$75 million) series B round, enabling it to move its lead micro-RNA (miRNA) inhibitor program into late-stage development in heart failure. The financing sets the stage for a potential revival of a therapeutic modality that had otherwise fallen out of favor with investors and with big pharma.
Innovent Biologics Inc.’s PCSK9 inhibitor, IBI-306, intended for the treatment of heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH), has met its primary endpoint in a phase III study in Chinese patients.
Tobacco firm Philip Morris International Inc. has announced another acquisition as it adopts a “beyond nicotine” strategy, snapping up Otitopic Inc., of Los Angeles, for an undisclosed sum.
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