Earlier this month, Evotec AG and MaRS Innovation announced the launch of Fibrocor Therapeutics LP. The startup joins the growing number of companies working on drugs to fight fibrosis.
It's been a long road for Generx (Ad5FGF-4), a gene therapy designed to express fibroblast growth factor-4 (FGF-4) to increase vascularization in the heart.
Venture capital investors gave it the old college try, but apparently they spent more time watching bowl games than investing in U.S. private biopharmaceutical companies in the fourth quarter.
Given the side effects and potential addiction issues with opioid drugs, pain-drug specialist Purdue Pharma L.P. is exploring options for other mechanisms of actions. Last week the company announced a deal with Anabios Corp. to accelerate Purdue's Nav1.7 sodium ion channel preclinical drug candidates.
The idea of synthetic biology – using computers, rather than trial and error, to rationally design drugs – has been around for years. But Woburn, Mass.-based Abpro is taking it to the next level with rationally designed antibodies using its Diversimmune platform. Labor intensive steps that used to take two to three years can now be done using bioinformatics that reduce the design time down to less than two months.
"Treat first, ask questions later" is typically the procedure for treating bacterial infections because the answers to those questions take a couple of days to elucidate while the lab cultures the bacteria to determine the strain.
Intranasal drug delivery isn't just for stuffy noses. Multiple drugs delivered through the nose have been approved in the past year despite not treating diseases of the nose.
The nonprofit Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (Tri-I TDI) was established three years ago as a partnership between Takeda Pharmaceuticals Ltd. and three New York-based academic institutions – Memorial Sloan Kettering, The Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medical College – to translate potential targets into pharmaceutical candidates.
Esbriet (pirfenidone, Roche Holding AG) and Ofev (nintedanib, Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH) were approved to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) by the FDA two years ago – serendipitously on the same day – giving patients in the U.S. their first treatment options for the lung disease.
