News

FEATURED STORIES
Early-stage financing rounds are on track to hit their lowest dollar value in years as funders continue to eschew risky investments, experts told BioSpace.
A mostly black box since emerging with more than a billion dollars in hand, Xaira Therapeutics is slowly pulling back the curtain, revealing plans to find partners and validate its pipeline.
IPO
After debuting on the public markets with $256.3 million and raking in an additional $472 million, Veradermics has emerged as one of biotech’s biggest post-IPO standouts. CEO Reid Waldman credits the weight loss craze for establishing consumer-driven channels.
FROM OUR EDITORS
Read our takes on the biggest stories happening in the industry.
Congressional letters sent to the CEOs of Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Merck, BMS and AbbVie this week voicing concerns about the pharmas’ clinical trials in China highlight an ongoing discrepancy in how government and industry think about the rise of the Asian country’s biotech industry.
THE LATEST
Staff cuts will leave IGM Biosciences with 37 employees. The company is also halting development of two bispecific antibody T cell engagers for autoimmune diseases.
After the successful development of mavacamten and the sale of MyoKardia to BMS in 2020, former executives of the biotech are back together with a mission to make cardiovascular disease curable and preventable.
The Biotech Ecosystem Venture Fund will combine the sourcing capabilities of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Eli Lilly’s expertise in R&D—plus half a billion in capital from the Big Pharma.
Research has shown remnant cholesterol is a significant factor in cardiovascular disease risk.
If approved, Pfizer’s sasanlimab will distinguish itself from Merck’s blockbuster Keytruda as the first PD-1 inhibitor indicated in combination with BCG for high-risk non-muscle invasive bladder cancer patients who had not previously undergone BCG treatment.
Concurrently, a preprint from the industry-backed Vital Transformation found a 50% drop in company investments into small-molecule drug development.
Eli Lilly’s idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis deal with Mediar is centered around MTX-463, an anti-WISP1 antibody that early studies have found to be safe and capable of engaging its target.
On Thursday, Boehringer Ingelheim announced a partnership with Synaffix to advance antibody-drug conjugates and exercised its fourth license option under a 2013 collaboration with Oxford BioTherapeutics.
Ouro is planning to leverage T cell engagers to deplete B cells and “reset” the immune system to treat immune-mediated diseases.
ALS
Misses from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis hopefuls Denali Therapeutics and partners AbbVie and Calico Life Sciences mark the latest setbacks for the controversial platform trial, the results from which have largely mirrored the dismal success rate in ALS overall.