May 14, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
SEATTLE – Kineta Inc. is expanding its physical footprint in Seattle by moving into a new site that provides an additional 6,000 square feet of space, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported Wednesday afternoon.
A maker of psoriasis and pain medications, Kineta moved its administrative operations into the new Seattle location that provided 6,000 square feet of office space. Lab operations will continue in the 10,000 square-foot facility the company has occupied. The move to larger digs did not prompt a hiring spree, although the Business Journal reported the company recently hired nine new employees, mostly in research positions.
The company needed the additional space, in part, because of a $10 million award to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a way to improve the effects of vaccines for such dread infectious diseases as Ebola, West Nile Virus, dengue and Japanese encephalitis. Kineta is one of the subcontracting companies working on the vaccines.
Seattle’s Biotech Presence
Seattle has seen some ups and downs as the Pacific Northwest’s biotech hub. In February Juno Therapeutics announced it was opening a new facility in Bothell, Wash. to manufacture the company’s cell therapy products, including Juno’s planned JCAR015 multicenter clinical trial.
Additionally, Seattle Genetics, Inc. , which focuses on drugs to treat various forms of cancer, including Hodgkin’s disease, announced it intended to grow its staff by about 100 employees. However, last year Amgen announced plans to shutter its Elliot Bay campus and Bothell manufacturing plants in Washington State, impacting nearly 700 jobs.
Positive News for Kineta
But things remain positive for the privately-held Kineta. Earlier this month Kineta announced safety and clinical results from its proof-of-concept Phase Ib clinical trial of dalazatide in patients with active plaque psoriasis. Dalazatide inhibits the Kv1.3 potassium channel, a new pharmaceutical target due to its expression on effector memory T-cells, the company said. Effector memory T-cells are a subset of the T-cell family that cause inflammation and tissue damage in a range of autoimmune diseases. Nine out of 10 patients who received the drug at its highest dose during the trial showed improvement.
In March pre-clinical animal trials showed topical use of ShK-186 on the surface of the eye as a topical therapy for autoimmune eye disease.
In addition to treatment of autoimmune eye diseases, ShK-186 has also shown promise in the treatment of psoriasis. In January Kineta completed enrollment of its Phase IB proof-of-concept clinical trial for psoriasis using its drug candidate, ShK-186. Results from this trial will be available later in 2015. Psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis are chronic diseases of the immune system.
Last year Kineta partnered with Michigan-based MPI Research, Germany-based Chimera Biotec; Ontario-based Life Chemicals Inc. and Mississippi-based Medical Marketing Economics (MME) Inc. to form KPI Therapeutics, which is part investment group and part strategic hub to unify research and development efforts, the Business Journal reported.
Will AbbVie, Genentech’s New Cancer Drug Be a Game Changer?
A promising new blood cancer therapy from AbbVie and Genentech that snagged headlines in early December for unexpectedly high rates of response in clinical trial patients has now been granted breakthrough status from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the companies said last week. The investigational drug, dubbed venetoclax, is an inhibitor of the B-cell lymphoma-2 (BCL-2) protein that is being developed by Abbvie in partnership with Genentech and Roche . BioSpace wants to know what you think this means for the broader market—and could venetoclax be a game changer?
