The mood going into the start of the 32nd annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco will be decidedly upbeat. How could it not be? The industry is just coming off one of its best performances in decades with many of the blue chip public biotech companies recording triple digit percentage gains in their share values.
Wall Street rejoiced over Intercept Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s stoppage for efficacy of the FLINT Phase IIb trial with obeticholic acid (OCA) for the treatment of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) – “the coming tsunami of liver disease,” said CEO Mark Pruzanski.
Avillon Group, of London, said it entered an exclusive collaborative development agreement with Pfizer Inc., of New York, to conduct a Phase III trial of Bosulif (bosutinib).
Three large financings, including another initial public offering (IPO), and a flurry of smaller deals in the first full week of the New Year – and on the eve of the bellwether J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco – signaled that money is continuing to flow into biotech in a big way.
Transgene SA was riding high Thursday after releasing top-line preliminary data from a Phase IIb/III study of TG4010, an immunotherapy being developed for non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
AC Immune SA raised CHF20 million (US$22 million) in a Series D round that will fund clinical development of a therapeutic vaccine for Alzheimer’s disease, ACI-35, which targets a phosphorylated species of tau protein thought to be involved in the progression of the condition.
A month after reporting promising preclinical data from its zinc finger nuclease (ZFN) therapy in beta-thalassemia at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting in New Orleans, Sangamo Biosciences Inc. licensed rights to the technology in a collaboration with Biogen Idec Inc. worth up to about $314 million total.
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