San Francisco Bay Area researchers from UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and Stanford University have combined their technologies to create Azalea Therapeutics Inc., a company focused on editing cells in vivo.

Celltrion Inc. scored a hat-trick of deals to license new antibody candidates, including a $744 million deal with Kaigene Inc. Nov. 3, and a near $500 million deal with Mustbio Co. Ltd. Oct. 31.

Qyuns Therapeutics Co. Ltd. signed a potential $1.07 billion license deal with Roche Holding AG, granting the latter exclusive rights to QX-031N – a human thymic stromal lymphopoietin and interleukin-33)-targeting bispecific antibody.

Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH has licensed an unnamed small-molecule preclinical candidate from Kyowa Kirin Co. Ltd. in the autoimmune disease space in a deal worth up to €640 million (US$739 million).

For 75 years, the standard tools for autoimmune disease have consisted of steroids, cytotoxics and broad biologics that tamp down the entire immune system. They can help, but they are rarely curative. “They’re blunt instruments,” Regcell Inc. CEO Mike McCullar told BioWorld. “They can’t distinguish good immune cells and bad immune cells,” which is why many carry black-box warnings and must be taken for years, sometimes for life.

Kaigene Inc. has entered into an exclusive global licensing agreement with Celltrion Inc. for two of Kaigene’s nonclinical-stage assets, KG-006 and KG-002. Kaigene’s pipeline leverages its technology to selectively degrade pathogenic antibodies that mainly exacerbate various autoimmune diseases.

In atopic dermatitis (AD), the itch-scratch cycle is tied to skin inflammation exacerbation that accelerates the progression of the disease, thus impacting the patient’s quality of life, where IL-31 is crucial to induce skin itching. Helixon Ltd. has developed a bispecific antibody targeting both IL-31 and OX40L, HXN-1022, for the treatment of AD.