LONDON – The terms for the U.K. leaving the EU should have been agreed in October, but instead, the crunch meeting came and went. Now, with just 150 days to go, "anything could happen," and for the life sciences industry "it's getting harder, not easier" to cover all the bases in its contingency planning, said Steve Bates, CEO of the Bioindustry Association, in his monthly Brexit webinar. Read More
Eli Lilly and Co. has agreed to pay Dicerna Pharmaceuticals Inc. $100 million up front while investing $100 million more in the company as part of a new licensing and research collaboration agreement focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of medicines aimed at "more than 10 targets" in cardiometabolic disease, neurodegeneration and pain indications. Read More
Although a few skeptics remain, Esperion Inc.'s top-line data from its pivotal phase III study known as Study 2, or 1002-047, with bempedoic acid (BA) for lowering LDL-C seemed to lay mostly to rest the worries brought on by five neoplasm (lung cancer) deaths in Study 1. "When we think back to May [when data from Study 1 with BA were disclosed], the issue was really: What is the perceived meaningfulness of what we called and still call the spurious result?" CEO Timothy Mayleben told BioWorld. Read More
Year-old cross-border biopharma Terns Pharmaceuticals Inc. put some lift behind its pipeline of molecularly targeted, oral small-molecule candidates with an $80 million series B financing led by new investors Vivo Capital and Orbimed. New investor Decheng Capital joined the round, along with existing investor Lilly Asia Ventures, which led the company's $30 million series A earlier this year. Read More
HONG KONG – Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) has initiated the Pharma Innovation Programme Singapore (PIPS) aimed at bringing together the city-state's public sector research capabilities and major global players in the pharma industry to transform the manufacturing operations and technologies of the industry for greater efficiencies. Read More
Researchers have teamed up to produce a permanent biomedical skin graft to be formed in the operating room (OR), deposited and set in place using a handheld, 3D skin printer. Current "split-thickness grafting" covers only the epidermis and a small portion of the dermis, leaving a portion of the wounded area uncovered so that it heals poorly. Read More
OSE Immunotherapeutics SA, of Nantes, France, published preclinical data for OSE-127, a monoclonal antibody targeting the IL-7 receptor (IL-7R), in Nature Communication. OSE-127 was shown to block two sites of IL-7R. Unlike antibodies that only bind to one site, OSE-127 didn't induce translational modifications of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells that are compatible with T-cell activation and inflammatory responses. OSE and its partner, Les Laboratoires Servier SAS, of Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, plan to move the drug into phase I development. Read More
Invectys SA, of Paris, received €15 million (US$17 million) in a series A financing led by an undisclosed life sciences-savvy family office. The company plans to use the capital to fund a phase II trial testing INVAC-1 in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Invectys has raised €38 million since being founded in 2010. Read More
The NIH's National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) is pausing the CONCERT-HF trial, following the retraction of journal articles in related fields of cell therapy research that raised concerns about the scientific foundations of the trial. Read More
