It’s no mystery why Scipher Medicine Corp. successfully raised $110 million in a series D financing round to further develop the company’s precision medicine platform. The company aims to address one of most modern medicine’s most challenging enigmas: how to eliminate the cost and adverse effects associated with the prescription of expensive medications that provide life-changing outcomes for some and no benefit for others. The new funds boost Scipher’s total funding to $227 million, of which $192 million has come into the Waltham, Mass.-based company’s coffers in the last 12 months.
PERTH, Australia – Prota Therapeutics Ltd.’s lead candidate PRT-120 induced clinical remission of peanut allergy in 51% of children in a phase IIb clinical trial. There are currently no curative therapies to treat food allergies, Prota Therapeutics CEO Mimi Tang told BioWorld. Peanut allergy in children can be particularly problematic because the only treatment is avoidance.
Remix Therapeutics Inc., a company developing small molecules to manipulate RNA processing, stands to earn upward of $1 billion through a new strategic collaboration with Janssen Pharmaceutica NV. A Cambridge, Mass.-based startup, Remix last year patented new RNA splicing modulators. It will receive an initial payment of $45 million for research funding plus potential preclinical, clinical, commercial and sales milestone payments, and royalties. Janssen gains exclusive rights to three targets with applications in immunology and oncology.
Third Harmonic Bio Inc. CEO Natalie Holles said the company’s $105 million in series B money will push THB-001 – a first-in-class, highly selective, oral inhibitor of wild-type KIT – “well past the first proof-of-concept study in inducible urticaria [hives].”
LONDON – Neuromuscular disease specialist NMD Pharma A/S has raised €35 million (US$39.7 million) in a new financing, as it awaits initial data from its first clinical trial, in the treatment of myasthenia gravis. The new money enables NMD to complete that phase IIa study and to launch another trial of the same compound, NMD-670, in spinal muscular atrophy. The Aarhus, Denmark-based company is preparing the IND and aims to treat the first patient before the end of 2022.
In the bad old days of cancer treatment, it was the nasty side effects of chemotherapy that often ended up limiting treatment – and while checkpoint inhibitors have raised the bar in terms of efficacy and safety, they can have dangerous and unpleasant off-target consequences, too. Finding ways to focus the immune system on cancer and limiting any off-target effects will not only make checkpoint inhibitor therapy more tolerable but could also improve survival rates – and Sweden’s Ilya Pharma AB aims to do this with a novel approach combining synthetic biology with cell therapy.
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