Montara Therapeutics Inc. has received $8 million seed financing from several investors to further its development of its ’binary pharmacology’ for diseases of the brain.

Researchers from the Second Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University and Shaoxing People's Hospital presented preclinical data for the signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) inhibitor STX-0119, which has been previously validated in models of cancer.

Ensho Therapeutics Inc. launched in July after licensing a pipeline of four oral α4β7 inhibitors for inflammatory and gastrointestinal disorders, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), from EA Pharma Co. Ltd. “Millions of people worldwide are living with IBD,” Ensho founder, president and executive chair Neena Bitritto-Garg recently told BioWorld, “and while there are a number of approved medications to address the symptoms of IBD, it remains a difficult-to-treat disease with high relapse rates for a considerable proportion of patients.”

The U.S. FDA has approved Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.’s Leqselvi (deuruxolitinib), a JAK1 and JAK2 inhibitor for adults with severe alopecia areata, a chronic autoimmune disease. The twice-daily, oral treatment will be targeting a company-estimated market of about 300,000 people in the U.S. This is the third FDA-approved treatment for severe alopecia areata in the past three years.

The dealmaking continues at Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH as it plans to buy Nerio Therapeutics Inc. for $1.3 billion. The German company is bolstering its cancer programs with the Nerio acquisition, which will be added to multibillion-dollar deals cut earlier this year for cancer immunotherapies and nonalcoholic or metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (NASH/MASH) treatments.

Scientists at Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH have made the ketohexokinase (KHK) inhibitor BI-9787 freely available as a tool compound via the company’s Opnme program.

DeepSA, an edit-based generative framework that utilizes deep simulated annealing (SA), was used to develop novel local anesthetics with multiple activities. Researchers from Sichuan University applied DeepSA to generate over 400 analogs of the local anesthetic articaine.

Researchers from Northeast Normal University in Changchun demonstrated that compound AW-01178 reversed the abnormal regulation of E-cadherin by inhibiting the class I HDAC enzyme.

Draupnir Bio is poised to advance a new approach to targeted protein degradation by engaging the sortilin receptor on lysosomes to promote the destruction of extracellular and membrane-bound disease proteins.

Cognition Therapeutics Inc. said it is moving to the next stage of clinical testing with oral, small-molecule candidate CT-1812, despite phase II efficacy results falling short of statistical significance in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease and sending shares of the Purchase, N.Y.-based company (NASDAQ:CGTX) falling 44%, or $1.04, to close July 29 at $1.33.