When the abstracts for the upcoming annual meeting of the American Society for Hematology were released last week, results of Geron Corp.’s Imetelstat were the biggest attention-grabber as far as the market was concerned. (See BioWorld Today, Nov. 8, 2013.)
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a relentless disease, and one with a rising prevalence. The National Institutes of Health estimates that some 200 cases are diagnosed every week in the U.S. alone. The advent of oral therapies is a hopeful sign in the effort to slow progression of the disease. The approval of three MS drugs so far in 2013 – followed by a pipeline brimming with hundreds of compounds – speaks to the resources the biopharma industry is aiming at the disease. (See BioWorld Insight, Nov. 4, 2013.)
Despite the fact that biotech companies developing biopharmaceuticals had a challenging month in October, with the 258 publicly listed companies tracked by the BioWorld Stock Report recording an average 7 percent drop in their share values, there is certainly no indication that the sector’s surge has stalled. In fact, despite predictions that biotech’s momentum has finally run out of steam, with less than two months to go until the end of the year biotech companies both large and small are still on target to post record-setting performances, a feat that has not been seen since 2000.
The Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Innovation Center, through J&J unit Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., is pledging up to $10 million up front per program, followed by as much as $145 million more for each, in a deal with Evotec AG that aims to find and target the true originators of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
Immungene Inc. landed a $9 million Series A round from Ally Bridge Group, a health care investment firm with offices in Hong Kong and the U.S., to advance its antibody-cytokine fusion technology platform targeting cancer therapies.
Novabay Pharmaceuticals Inc. took a pounding in the stock market Thursday after it reported the failure of a Phase IIb study of its impetigo candidate, auriclosene. The study showed that the drug was safe and well tolerated but did not meet the primary clinical endpoint of the trial.
Just in time for the holidays, the FTC is gifting itself on the biopharma industry by finalizing a change to its premerger notification rule that makes transfers of “all commercially significant rights” to drug, biologic and in vitro diagnostic patents subject to antitrust review under the Hart Scott Rodino (HSR) Act.
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