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.
Rivus Pharmaceuticals Inc. has emerged from stealth and disclosed a $35 million series A round to fund development of its pipeline of “controlled metabolic accelerators,” or CMAs, for treating cardiometabolic diseases.
Cytokinetics Inc. CEO Robert Blum declined to remark upon what one analyst called “the elephant in the room” as the company popped the lid off positive top-line data from the first and second cohorts of the phase II study with CK-3773274 (known by the shorthand CK-274) in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM).
Despite assembling the largest body of data the FDA said it may ever see for a drug intended to treat anemia due to chronic kidney disease, Fibrogen Inc. will have to get even more trial data to push roxadustat over the finish line in the U.S. – if the FDA follows the advice of its Cardiovascular and Renal Drugs Advisory Committee.
Approval could come next year for Furoscix from Scpharmaceuticals Inc. (Scpharma), a solution of the standard-of-care heart failure diuretic furosemide formulated to a neutral pH and designed for outpatient use.
Recent findings with the sodium glucose transporter-2 inhibitor Jardiance (empagliflozin) from Boehringer Ingelheim International GmbH and Eli Lilly and Co. drew more attention to the cardiovascular space.
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