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.
The first formal human cardiac safety study of Firdapse (amifampridine phosphate) met its pre-specified endpoint, demonstrating no effect on heart rate or cardiac depolarization when administered at and above therapeutic levels.
Privately held Bellicum Pharmaceuticals Inc. added another $14.7 million from existing investors, including AVG Ventures and Remeditex Ventures, to its fully subscribed Series B, ratcheting the total raise from the round to $34.4 million and extending the company’s runway into 2015.
A recent paper from the Center for Technology Innovation and Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington makes the argument that the conventional technology transfer (TT) model at U.S. research universities, with its emphasis on patenting and licensing inventions funded by federal research grants, has failed to stem the nation’s so-called “innovation deficit.”
In an S-1 slid into the SEC on New Year’s Eve, following a confidential filing a month earlier, Dicerna Pharmaceuticals Inc. joined Revance Therapeutics Inc. in seeking to extend biotech’s initial public offering (IPO) window into the new year. (See related story this issue.)
Portage, with its meaning of carrying cargo between two bodies of water, seems an intuitive name for a Canadian biotech. Certainly, the significance was meaningful to Toronto-based Portage Biotech Inc. (PBI), which is applying transporter technology to create cell permeable peptide fusion proteins in a variety of potential indications.
As 2013 ticked away, Intrexon Corp. extended a string of biotech deals by inking an exclusive channel collaboration (ECC) with Agilis Biotherapeutics LLC, which simultaneously launched with an $8 million financing.
Shares of Ophthalix Inc. (OTCQB:OPLI) swooned Monday after the company disclosed that CF101, an A3 adenosine receptor (A3AR) agonist licensed from parent company Can-Fite Biopharma Ltd., failed to meet primary and secondary efficacy endpoints in a Phase III study in moderate-to-severe dry eye syndrome (DES).
As a biotech business development executive turned best-selling author, Doug Richards has been compared to Michael Crichton for penning novels that straddle the line between suspense and science fiction with a biomedical twist.
Love it or hate it, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is poised for implementation in 2014, likely creating winners and losers across the health care landscape. To date, the impact on biotechs and pharmas has been relegated to background noise, but the tenor of those discussions is growing as implications of the law pervade every corner of the delivery system.
