BOSTON – In moving a startup along, "I don't think [valuation] is where you start," Sentien Biotherapeutics Inc. CEO Brian Miller told attendees of Biopharm America. "I think you have to almost end there."
Interim CEO Alexis Borisy told BioWorld Today that, thanks to "all these really cool technologies that have just matured or just emerged," Relay Therapeutics Inc. is ready to advance beyond inhibitors that do their jobs in conventional ways and aim its further research in such a way as to detect and characterize dynamic interactions anywhere on a protein. New methods together will do more than any of the static, snapshot approaches can accomplish alone.
BOSTON – Tweaks were made this year to the format of Biopharm America, which featured shorter, snappier sessions intended to stimulate exactly the kind of early partnering talks that the event is designed to foster.
Chief Scientific Officer Philip Gregory told BioWorld Today that, while Bluebird Bio Inc. didn't "want to speculate as to how the molecules do their thing, from an output perspective, we understand it very well."
A slightly higher-than-previous placebo response on the primary endpoint of two hours' freedom from headache did little to take the shine off top-line phase III migraine data disclosed by Colucid Pharmaceuticals Inc. with lasmiditan tablets in the trial known as SAMURAI.
Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s $624 million cash buyout of Cynapsus Therapeutics Inc. puts premium firepower behind the race for a drug to treat off episodes in Parkinson's disease (PD) and brings aboard an on-demand, sublingual candidate "well matched to patients' symptoms," Antony Loebel, Sunovion's chief medical officer, told BioWorld Today.
Data due by the end of the year from the phase Ib trial testing Proteostasis Therapeutics Inc.'s cystic fibrosis (CF) prospect PTI-428 could trigger moves by developers in the space looking to pair the drug with therapies such as Orkambi (lumacaftor/ivacaftor) from Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc.
As investors look ahead to results later this year from the second phase III trial with Rigel Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s fostamatinib, principal investigator James Bussel said "the fact that, at least so far, the results in this [first] phase III trial mimic and are very similar to the first phase II trial gives all of us on the Rigel team a lot of confidence."
Hemispherx Biopharma Inc. CEO Thomas Equels told BioWorld Today that the approval in the Argentine Republic of rintatolimod for severe myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is “the opening of a door” to the rest of the world, which is waking up to the reality of the disease as research picks up momentum.
Although Infinity Pharmaceuticals Inc. CEO Adelene Perkins said her firm's "going-in assumption is that we will be successful" in selling rights to phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) inhibitor duvelisib, Abbvie Inc.'s decision to pull out of their partnership undoubtedly threw cold water on the class.
