DUBLIN – After 18 months in stealth mode, Ventus Therapeutics Inc. has emerged with $60 million in series A funding and big ambitions to bring insights from structural biology to bear on two key aspects of innate immunity, inflammasome activation and cGAS-Sting signaling.
DUBLIN – Shares in Valneva SE rose by as much as 32% during early trading April 30 on news that Pfizer Inc. is paying $130 million up front to in-license its Lyme disease candidate vaccine, VLA-15.
DUBLIN – Kurma Partners closed its third biotech fund, Kurma Biofund III, at €160 million (US$174 million), €10 million ahead of its initial target. The Paris-based fund will allocate the bulk of the capital to therapeutics firms, but it is also open to opportunistic investments in med tech, particularly in digital health applications and in biotech-med tech convergence, partner Peter Neubeck told BioWorld.
DUBLIN – Thrive Earlier Detection Corp. and its academic and clinical collaborators have provided a first glimpse at the utility of a liquid biopsy test as a screening tool for picking up cancers in an asymptomatic population. In an interim one-year readout of data from the prospective five-year DETECT-A study in 10,000 women, an early version of Thrive’s Cancerseek test picked up 26 cancers ahead of standard-of-care screening, while the latter modality picked up another 24 cancers that Cancerseek missed.
DUBLIN – Compass Pathways Ltd. raised $80 million in a series B round to continue its development of the psychedelic drug psilocybin in treatment-resistant depression.
DUBLIN – The Swiss biotech sector raised about CHF1.2 billion ($$1.2 billion) in equity investment in 2019, a significant downward dip on the last two years, but well ahead of its average annual raise of CHF800 million over the past decade, according to the newly published Swiss Biotech Report 2020.
DUBLIN – Genespire Srl, a Milan-based startup led by gene therapy pioneer Luigi Naldini, is the third company to receive funding from Sofinnova Partners’ Italian €108 million (US$117.5 million) gene therapy fund, the Sofinnova Telethon Fund.
DUBLIN – Can an investigational drug best known for reducing itch in dermatitis patients really lower the risk of COVID-19 patients progressing to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)? It might seem like a stretch, even in the midst of a pandemic, but New York’s largest health care provider, Manhasset-based Northwell Health, appears sufficiently convinced by the biological rationale to get behind a phase III trial of tradipitant, a neurokinin-1 (NK1) receptor blocker, which Washington-based Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. is already testing in phase III trials in atopic dermatitis, gastroparesis and motion sickness.
DUBLIN – Sanofi SA and Glaxosmithkline plc are lending their considerable weight to the urgent global effort to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 by teaming up to develop an adjuvanted recombinant subunit vaccine that will employ technologies from each company. Paris-based Sanofi is contributing its recombinant spike protein antigen and its baculovirus expression system, which is also the basis of its U.S.-licensed influenza vaccine Flublok. London-based GSK is contributing its pandemic adjuvant technology.
DUBLIN – At the best of times, drug development is, of course, a complex problem. It is all the more demanding still in the middle of a pandemic, when the threat to human life is increasing exponentially, and health care systems are buckling under an extraordinary burden. Optimizing the development of drugs and vaccines in order to quickly generate high-quality evidence of their safety and efficacy is, therefore, a critical task, but an online webinar organized by the drug development consultants Certara LP, in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, suggested that, at this stage of the crisis, that lesson has yet to be absorbed.
