For privately held Good Therapeutics Inc., founded in 2016 with a platform technology for developing context-dependent therapeutics, the plan had always been to seek a buyer for the first asset to emerge. One came along a little earlier than expected, as Roche Holding AG entered a merger agreement for Good, picking up preclinical-stage PD-1-regulated IL-2 program, in exchange for an up-front cash payment of $250 million. Read More
Arsenal Biosciences Inc. closed on an oversubscribed $220 million series B financing so it could continue developing its programmable cell therapy research programs and its candidates for treating solid tumor malignancies. Arsenal’s lead program is AB-1015 for treating ovarian cancer. Read More
Wall Street trimmed shares of Veru Inc. (NASDAQ:VERU) by upwards of 20% in the wake of an editorial published Aug. 23 in The New England Journal of Medicine publication NEJM Evidence. The opinion piece, by two critical-care pulmonologists, added verve to the debate about the efficacy of drugs for people hospitalized with COVID-19. Read More
How well connectomic models of the brain could be used to the predict performance of a specific person on cognitive tests was influenced by sociodemographic characteristics of that person, such as age and education. The findings, which were published in the Aug. 25, 2022, issue of Nature, suggest that models of cognition “are not predicting unitary cognitive constructs, such as episodic memory. Rather, they are predicting composites: measures of these constructs intertwined with sociodemographic and clinical covariates,” first author Abigail Greene told BioWorld. Read More
Pharmaxis Ltd. has found new funding to breathe life into a drug that looked like it might sit on the shelf for a while, but now appears to be a good candidate for tackling Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. Read More
Akston Biosciences Corp. emerged from a successful small company that was sold to a pharma major. For Todd Zion, that’s a back-to-basics move that suits him just fine. Zion co-founded Smartcells Inc. in 2003 with technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The company went on to develop the once-daily injectable self-regulating insulin product, Smartinsulin, and sold it to Merck & Co. in what was at the time one of the largest preclinical pharmaceutical acquisitions ever. Read More
Biopharma happenings, including deals and partnerships, grants, preclinical data and other news in brief: Bostongene, Brickell, Carmell, Dizlin, Equillium, Elicio, Hoth, Immunovant, Metacrine, Nanotics, Oncoresponse, Orbital, Regeneron, Synaptixbio, Synlogic, Vernalis, Wugen. Read More
Regulatory snapshots, including global drug submissions and approvals, clinical trial approvals and other regulatory decisions and designations: Alvotech, Amylyx, Aston, Astrazeneca, Bausch + Lomb, Novaliq, Novavax, Tenaya. Read More
