With its hands full developing QRL-101 and QRL-201, both in clinical trials for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis with plans to expand into other neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal dementia, Quralis Corp. has decided to out-license its preclinical ALS and FTD drug, QRL-204.
Altrubio Inc. secured up to $225 million in an oversubscribed series B financing round, led by BVF Partners LP. The full amount is dependent on Altrubio meeting certain undisclosed milestones. New investors RA Capital Management, Cormorant Asset Management and Soleus Capital, and existing investors Amoon Fund and Blackstone Multi-Asset Investing, as well as other new and existing investors, also participated in the financing round.
With valuations heading higher, pharmaceutical companies are looking to make deals. “The M&A environment has kind of woken up a little bit,” Jay Stamatis, vice president and head of business development and acquisitions at Abbvie Inc., told the audience at Biocom California’s Global Life Science Partnering & Investor Conference.
Venture capitalists (VCs) on three different panels at Biocom California’s Global Life Science Partnering & Investor Conference gave advice to startups on a range of topics from what they’re looking for before investing to what startups should be doing to find pharma partners.
Biocom California’s Global Life Science Partnering & Investor Conference kicked off with a panel discussion focused on artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery. While there’s been a lot of hype over how AI and machine learning have the potential to help companies speed up drug development, panelists hypothesized the largest opportunities are in developing new capabilities, potentially increasing the success rate going from discovery to regulatory approval.
Following up on a 2021 partnership with Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Bridgene Biosciences Inc. has signed up a second international drug company, Galapagos NV, to use its chemoproteomic platform, IMTAC (Isobaric Mass Tagged Affinity Characterization), to discover small-molecule drug candidates.
Multiple studies at the 65th American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting 2023 have the potential to change the treatment paradigm for first-line treatment of multiple myeloma.
It’s not every day you see a small drug company’s presentations get picked for both the plenary session and the late-breaker session at a conference, but Syndax Pharmaceuticals Inc. managed to do just that at the 65th American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting 2023 – with a little help from a friend.
CAR T-cell therapies have worked well at curing blood malignancies, but a group out of the University Hospital of Erlangen have repurposed the technology as a treatment for autoimmune diseases. The expansion into new diseases has required cooperation between multiple departments, with CAR T experts taking the lead on treatment and potential side effects, and rheumatologists measuring the outcomes of the treatment.
Performing experiments and potentially manufacturing products in space offers some unique advantages in a near-zero gravity environment. Space changes buoyancy, hydrostatic pressure and convective heat flow. Researchers are studying how those changes affect cells, but also looking to take advantage of the changes to create products in manufacturing processes that wouldn’t be possible on earth.
