At the BIO International Convention, nonprofit and for-profit companies discussed ways to fund orphan drug development, especially for ultra-rare diseases where development costs can be challenging. One of the simplest ways to keep costs down is to skip the discovery phase and use repurposed drugs or rescue shelved therapeutic assets as the Orphan Therapeutics Accelerator has done. The Cambridge, Mass.-based accelerator was founded in 2024 to rescue shelled therapeutic assets for ultrarare diseases.
Elixiron Immunotherapeutics Inc. announced positive interim open-label phase II Alzheimer’s disease (AD) study findings of enrupatinib, an oral brain-penetrant colony-stimulating factor 1 receptor inhibitor, with plans to move the asset into a biomarker-based and placebo-controlled study.
