Century Therapeutics Inc.’s $3.25 billion deal with Bristol Myers Squibb Co. (BMS) was the largest of four billion-dollar-plus agreements announced Dec. 10, piggybacking on a busy week that includes the start of the 40th annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
LONDON – Natural killer (NK) cell therapy specialist Onk Therapeutics Ltd. has raised $21.5 million in a series A, enabling it to move three lead programs into proof-of-concept animal testing and to progress manufacturing and scale-up of its cord blood-derived cells.
Diabetes care will continue to evolve in 2022. New digital offerings and advanced algorithms, along with new product launches in insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) will power growth in the future, according to key analysts. While many medical device sectors have suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, diabetes care has continued to grow.
PERTH, Australia – Stem cell therapy company Mesoblast Ltd. provided new subgroup analyses from its phase III advanced chronic heart failure trial showing a greater treatment benefit from rexlemestrocel-L in high-risk patients with chronic heart failure and low ejection fraction (HFrEF) with diabetes or ischemia.
PERTH, Australia – Stem cell therapy company Mesoblast Ltd. provided new subgroup analyses from its phase III advanced chronic heart failure trial showing a greater treatment benefit from rexlemestrocel-L in high-risk patients with chronic heart failure and low ejection fraction (HFrEF) with diabetes or ischemia. The company had reported in December 2020 that the allogeneic mesenchymal cell therapy failed to meet the primary endpoint of a reduction in hospitalizations in its DREAM-HF phase III trial.
Clade Therapeutics Inc., which launched with an $87 million series A round, may have what sounds like an ambitious goal: to create scalable, off-the-shelf stem cell-based medicines that can be as accessible to patients as antibody therapies are today. But the startup, backed by more than two decades of advances in the area of induced pluripotent stem cells, is within sight of developing a cell therapy to take into clinical testing.
As if it were needed, Amicus Therapeutics Inc.’s spin-off of its gene therapy work and PDUFA VII’s provisions to increase the capacity of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research offered further proof this week of the global explosion that’s happening in the regenerative medicine field.
The PDUFA commitment letter negotiated between industry and the U.S FDA every five years provides an inside look at the future of drug development. The PDUFA VII letter, which is to be presented to Congress by Jan. 15, is no exception.
DUBLIN – Treefrog Therapeutics SA closed a $75 million series B round this week, which will help to increase its reach and its profile, as it pursues its highly ambitious objective to drive the adoption of a new way of making induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) at scale. The Bordeaux, France-based firm is not a CDMO in any sense, however. It is a fully fledged biotech, with early stage iPSC-based programs in Parkinson’s disease, cardiovascular disease and bone marrow transplant, among others. It’s just that it is also attempting to revolutionize how those cells are cultivated before it administers them as therapies.
The axolotl, which can regenerate many of its body parts, was the inspiration for Walking Fish Therapeutics Inc., which just closed on a $50 million series A financing to advance its B-cell therapies for oncology, rare disease, regenerative medicine, autoimmune disease and recombinant antibody production.