Soleno Therapeutics Inc., of Redwood City, Calif., said it entered a definitive agreement with certain institutional and accredited investors to raise aggregate gross proceeds of about $15 million through the private placement of its equity securities.

HONG KONG – Controversy has continued to mount in the Philippines around Sanofi Pasteur Ltd.'s dengue vaccine, Dengvaxia, which is now facing questions about its effectiveness and the manner and speed with which the government adopted it in its national vaccination program.

LONDON – Psioxus Therapeutics Ltd. has received approval for a phase I trial of NG-348, the first of its gene therapy for tumor products, triggering a $15 million milestone from partner Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMS).

Are drug prices turning what's being called the golden age of science into the gilded age in the U.S.? That's the question Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) posed Tuesday as the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee held its third hearing on high drug prices.

LONDON – Newco Northsea Therapeutics BV has sailed onto the scene with a portfolio of structurally engineered fatty acids and a €25 million (US$29.4 million) series A funding round to take the lead product, icosabutate (PRC-4016), through phase IIb in the treatment of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

Just four months out from its $128.2 million August IPO, Montreal-based Clementia Pharmaceuticals Inc. is moving palovarotene, its lead candidate, into a registrational phase III trial testing its ability to treat fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP), an ultra-rare bone disorder.

ATLANTA – Bioverativ Inc. wasted little time moving the monoclonal antibody (MAb) BIVV-009 into phase III development after picking up the complement C1s subcomponent inhibitor, previously known as TNT-009, in its potential $825 million acquisition of True North Therapeutics Inc. (See BioWorld Today, May 24, 2017.)

ATLANTA – Abbvie Inc.'s vice president of oncology, Gary Gordon, told BioWorld that his firm aims to "restate the standard of care" in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and the firm moved another step closer with full results from the phase III Murano trial, detailed in a late-breaking session at the American Society of Hematology meeting.

Proteostasis Therapeutics Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., disclosed positive study results across all three of the company's cystic fibrosis (CF) pipeline programs. Those include a study in CF subjects for PTI-428, a cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) amplifier; interim data for a study in CF subjects for PTI-801, a new generation CFTR corrector; and studies in healthy volunteers for PTI-808, a CFTR potentiator, and the combination of PTI-428, PTI-801 and PTI-808.

Actinium Pharmaceuticals Inc., of New York, reported results from a study of 865 samples from U.S. patients with multiple myeloma (MM), which showed that 25 percent had CD33 expression.