Mabwell Bioscience Co. Ltd. and Aditum Bio Management Co. LLC announced, in after-market hours Sept. 17, an agreement to forge a new company called Kalexo Bio Inc. and load the biotech with a preclinical dyslipidemia asset via a potential $1 billion global license deal.

To say the team at Ollin Biosciences Inc. has some experience in ophthalmology would be an understatement. The company, which emerged from stealth with $100 million in venture capital and two in-licensed assets with plans to add more, brings to the table years of expertise from work on blockbuster retinal disease drugs Lucentis (ranibizumab, Roche AG) and Vabysmo (faricimab, Roche AG).

Allrock Bio Inc. secured $50 million in a series A round co-led by Versant Ventures and Westlake Biopartners to advance ROC-101, an oral pan-rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK) inhibitor to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension and pulmonary hypertension with interstitial lung disease.

Braveheart Bio Inc. is paying $65 million up front to license Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd.’s oral hypertrophic cardiomyopathy drug candidate called HRS-1893.

A few years after it was founded with the aim of taking RNA therapies to the next level, Arnatar Therapeutics Inc. emerged from stealth, disclosing a $52 million series A round raised in 2024 as well as U.S. FDA orphan and rare pediatric disease designations for ART-4, an antisense oligonucleotide candidate targeting the root cause of Alagille syndrome.

Partly focused on delivery challenges that have limited the reach of RNA medicines, new biotech company Axelyf Inc. closed a $2.6 million seed round to support development of its AXL technology and to advance lead autoimmune candidate AXL-003.

Quoted technology commercialization company Puretech Health plc is scouting for third parties to fund phase III development of deupirfenidone, after spinning the respiratory drug into a new startup, Celea Therapeutics.

Singapore-based Immortal Dragons has launched with $40 million under management, mostly from its founder Boyang Wang, with a focus on investing in early stage companies developing treatments to extend life.

“Our mission is to apply our protein-protein interaction (PPI) big data-generation platform to create novel antibody therapeutics,” Proteina Co. Ltd. CEO Yoon Tae-young recently told BioWorld. “We have been working to build a proprietary technology platform for more than 15 years,” Yoon said, “and we take pride in the fact that we made our own technology platform, instead of running a company based on licensed-in technology.”