When Trevor Baglin, a hematologist at Addenbrooke's Hospital at Cambridge University had a head injury patient with a much better-than-expected outcome, he did something unusual. He got very curious.
Takeda California Inc., of San Diego, a subsidiary of Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., partnered with Sea Lane Biotechnologies, of Mountain View, Calif., giving Takeda access to Sea Lane's Concirt human antibody libraries for its drug discovery program in exchange for an up-front payment and milestone option fees for projects initiated under the collaboration.
Agios Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., filed for an initial public offering (IPO) to raise up to $86 million to fund development of its pipeline in cancer and inborn errors of metabolism (IEMs), a subset of orphan genetic metabolic diseases.
Execs at BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. hope to repeat their Phase II success with PEG-PAL (PEGylated recombinant phenylalanine ammonia lysate) for phenylketonuria in a new Phase III program.
A bit more than a year after handing in positive results in a Phase II study for AKB-6548 in chronic kidney disease (CKD), Akebia Therapeutics Inc., of Cincinnati, secured a $41 million Series C financing to fund ongoing development of the drug.
Oncothyreon Inc., of Seattle, will plunk down $10 million up front upon initiation of a new collaboration with Array BioPharma Inc., of Boulder, Colo., around ARRY-380, a small-molecule inhibitor of HER2, which according to the company is the only one in development.
At a time when a majority of biotech companies are partnering up with big pharma for Phase III trials, Ophthotech Corp., of Princeton, N.J., is building a war chest to go it alone.
Seaside Therapeutics Inc. reluctantly terminated an open-label extension study of STX209 (arbaclofen), for Fragile X syndrome, due to resource limitations. The company said the decision was not related to any safety issues with the drug, and expressed regret that the termination of the trial would be "disruptive and disappointing for many families."
Portola Pharmaceuticals Inc. has become the latest biotech to go public in a rush driven by surging financial markets. The South San Francisco-based company has become the 12th biotech in the 2013 IPO class, and another dozen are filed and pending, signaling a definitive end to the long wait for markets to regain avid interest in new biotech opportunities following the market crash of 2008.
