Visterra Inc.'s $30 million series B financing brought in more than expected and leaves the company with "a clear path for the next couple of years" to pursue therapies in dengue fever and influenza, said CEO Brian Pereira.

Would-be therapies in respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) took center stage with Johnson & Johnson's (J&J) plan to take over Alios Biopharma Inc. for $1.75 billion, gaining a pipeline that includes the phase II oral nucleoside analogue AL-8176 in RSV and a uridine nucleotide (nuke) analogue, AL-335, for hepatitis C virus (HCV) – another, less loudly touted driver for the deal.

BOSTON – The head of Pfizer Inc.'s Center for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI) called Boston "a wildly synergistic hotbed" for new ideas, during a panel on the final day of EBD Group's BioPharm America, designed to hook up would-be partners for talks around drug development deals.

BOSTON – With autoimmune/anti-inflammatory agents abounding, biotech firms may be hard pressed to develop competitive drugs, but the market still is worth going after and big pharma is willing to pay for therapies that can help the wide sector of nonresponders.

Onlookers may have had their doubts about the setup between Avalon Ventures and Glaxosmithkline plc (GSK) that led to last November's launch of Sitari Pharmaceuticals Inc. by way of $10 million in series A cash with a buyout option for GSK, and brought a promise of as many as 10 companies to be established the same way.

BOSTON – How to navigate the push-pull when pricing buyback options, handle pharma's "not-big-enough" complaints about pre-contract trials and manage the tension between venture capital and biotech management in forging deals: Such were among the topics taken up at BioPharm America, which opened Monday.

Proposed changes in labels for testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) products sent ripples across the space, after the first of a two-day meeting of FDA advisors concluded with a 20-1 vote that the drugs ought only to be used in classic hypogonadism – low testosterone due to testicular or disease of the hypothalamic/pituitary glands.

Following up last year's deal with Baxter International Inc. for the Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitor pacritinib in myelofibrosis (MF), CTI Biopharma Corp.'s sealed an agreement with Les Laboratoires Servier SA that brings €14 million (US$18.1 million) up front and could be worth as much as €103 million if all milestones are achieved with Pixuvri (pixantrone), conditionally approved in the European Union for aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) patients who failed two or three prior lines of therapy.

Right on time, the FDA gave its marketing nod to Nektar Therapeutics Inc.'s Movantik (naloxegol) as an oral treatment for opioid-induced constipation (OIC) in adults with chronic noncancer pain, and the peripherally active mu-opioid receptor antagonist (PAMORA) will be available to patients in the first half of next year.

Exploratory analyses of phase II results with the sclerostin inhibitor romosozumab (romo) in postmenopausal women with low bone mineral density (BMD) turned up more good news for Amgen Inc. and partner UCB SA, which have the compound in phase III already.