What a difference two weeks makes. When I was researching last week’s BioWorld Insight cover – about how emerging biotech Verastem Inc., mature biotech Ironwood Pharmaceuticals Inc. and specialty pharma firm Clovis Oncology Inc. shared some surprising similarities in how they approached their initial public offerings – I put together a chart that showed aftermarket performance for the entire 2010-2012 biotech IPO class was about flat. I was all ready to blog about how that’s better than I would have guessed, given the negative press we tend to hear about IPOs and the market in general. Then Monday morning brought...
The biotech industry often frets over the availability of funding for early stage biotechs, but start-ups are not the only ones feeling the pinch these days.
Martin Shkreli has never been one to go with the flow. The hedge fund manager at MSMB Capital Management is known for activism: He helped derail the proposed merger between AMAG Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Allos Therapeutics Inc., fought Pfizer Inc.'s decision to replace CEO Jeff Kindler with an insider and has pushed out several health care CEOs he felt weren't doing their jobs.
With deal flow indicating there's plenty of appetite for fibrosis drugs, Promedior Inc. pulled in $21.5 million in the first closing of a Series D financing aimed at advancing and expanding its fibrosis pipeline.
A recent analysis from Deloitte Recap LLC showed that, when it comes to advancing a product from Phase I to approval, the odds are significantly better for biotechs who have a big pharma or big biotech partner.
Less than a year after picking up several regional options to Boston Biomedical Inc.'s lead cancer stem cell drug BBI608, Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma Co. Ltd. skipped exercising those options in favor of an all-out acquisition.
While early efforts to target phosphoinositide-3 kinase (PI3K) involved pan-inhibition, biotechs like Intellikine Inc. and Calistoga Pharmaceuticals Inc. differentiated themselves by selectively targeting the alpha, beta, delta and/or gamma isoforms of PI3K rather than hitting the whole family.
Melanoma drug Zelboraf (vemurafenib, Daiichi Sankyo Co. Ltd. and Roche AG) and lung cancer drug Xalkori (crizotinib, Pfizer Inc.) proved incorporating a companion diagnostic early in clinical development can save time and money: Both drugs advanced from Phase I to FDA approval in five years. (See BioWorld Insight, Sept. 6, 2011.)
Continuing the recent frenzy of dealmaking activity in the hepatitis C virus (HCV) space, Enanta Pharmaceuticals Inc. is expected to announce Tuesday morning that it licensed preclinical NS5A inhibitor EDP-239 to Novartis AG in a deal worth up to $440 million.
