Olivia Vizier

When Berra Yazar-Klosinski was wrapping up her PhD in molecular cell and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz, there was an unassuming little office right down the road, hidden inside a bungalow-style house with a postage-square lawn.

Venture-capital investment in the biotechnology sector has proved to be resilient so far this year, despite stock-market turbulence and the slower pace of initial public offerings.

Alto Neuroscience wants to use EEG brain biomarkers to better match the right treatment to a person’s needs.

Entasis, which focuses on developing new antibacterial drugs to treat pathogens, utilizes a precision medicine approach to design specific drugs to target specific bacteria.

BlueSphere Bio’s CEO Dr. David Apelian explains the difficulties associated with treating solid tumor cancers as well as what the CGT sector needs to get right in the short term and why.

Ring Therapeutics was launched to take advantage of the viral residents of our bodies – the vast majority of which are anelloviruses. 

The FDA has lifted theclinical hold on Selecta Biosciences’ gene therapy to treat methylmalonic acidemia, a rare disease in children that affects metabolism. The company is now back in the saddle as it preps for a phase 1 trial. 

France-based biologics company Valneva will be advancing toward U.S. Food and Drug Administration accelerated approval of its specialty vaccine, VLA1553. The single-shot chikungunya vaccine was shown to be safe and effective against mosquito-transmitted chikungunya disease in a published analysis of Phase III results.

 To combat the problem of antifungal resistance, Scynexis developed an entirely new class of fungicide: triterpenoid antifungal, which doctors can prescribe when first-line azole treatments don’t work.

Anixa recently launched a Phase I trial of its breast cancer vaccine in patients who have completed treatment for early-stage, triple-negative breast cancer within the past three years and are currently tumor-free but at high risk for recurrence. 

Her company AltruBio focuses on novel therapeutics for immunological diseases, concentrating on unmet medical needs. The company’s lead candidate, therapeutic antibody neihulizumab, has demonstrated clinical proof of efficacy in treating multiple autoimmune and immune-mediated diseases.  

TFF Pharmaceuticals is on the hunt for new partners, and a recently-announced agreement with Catalent could help them land just that.

Executive president of MindMed, Miri Halperin Wernli, PhD, added: “LSD and psilocybin have recently become promising candidates for the treatment of various psychiatric and neurologic disorders, and thus a deeper understanding of their differential subjective effects in humans is needed. 

Cerevance has developed its proprietary, Nuclear Enriched Transcript Sort sequencing (NETSseq) platform to analyze postmortem human brain tissues to produce rich cell type–specific data sets. 

Portage Biotech: Clinical-stage oncology company dedicated to sourcing and acquiring the most promising early-stage assets available to build a pipeline of first-in-class/best-in-class therapeutic candidates. Currently, has well-established partnerships with both Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck.

Teclison, a Princeton, NJ-based clinical-stage biotechnology company developing innovative cancer therapeutics to induce tumor necrosis and enhance anti-tumor immunity, closed a $5.9m funding round.

The FDA has granted investigational device exemption to medical diagnostics company Check-Cap for a two-part pivotal study to evaluate C-Scan, a new screening test that detects precancerous polyps.

There are currently no approved treatments for the prevention of recurrent VVC, but Scynexis said it will submit the new phase 3 data to the FDA in the first half of 2022 and expects that ibrexafungerp tablets will be approved for this indication by the end of the year.

Cancer intervention and prevention company Check Cap is developing new, low-invasive ingestible capsule technology that aims to address issues associated with preventive screenings for colonoscopies.

As Glenn Mattes, CEO of TFF Pharmaceuticals, told BioSpace, “The persistent rise of COVID-19 cases, including among the vaccinated, has understandably impacted the morale of both the biopharma industry and the broader community.”

MeiraGTx Holdings PLC said it received a $30 million payment from Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., part of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos. of Johnson & Johnson, for a clinical milestone in a Phase 3 trial of botaretigene sparoparvovec.

The US Food and Drug Administration has cleared an Investigational New Drug application allowing MindMed to move forward with a phase 2b dose-optimization trial of MM-120 for the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

To address both of these challenges, TFF Pharmaceuticals has developed a process called Thin Film Freezing (TFF), which produces drugs that are highly soluble and stable in a powder form, for a variety of applications, including delivery to the lung. 

Recce’s lead drug candidate, called R327, is a synthetic polymer that is currently undergoing Phase I trials for sepsis, with an ongoing Phase I/II trial for burn wound infections. According to Graham, R327 utilizes multiple inhibitory mechanisms that work in “a synergistic compounding fashion.” These mechanisms include adenosine triphosphate (ATP) inhibition, cell membrane permeabilization and

San Jose-based Anixa Biosciences is looking to keep “retired” proteins from coming back and causing havoc to the body—particularly in the form of triple-negative breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

You also need to be strong in other parts of your body if you want to keep active. In your knees, you need to maintain strength, but also flexibility and muscular balance, says Fred Cushner, M.D., an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City and chief medical officer for Canary

Another company, Renovacor, is looking beyond oncology to cardiology – specifically to dilated cardiomyopathy. Its precision gene replacement therapy targets patients with mutations in the BAG3 gene that causes lower levels of BAG3 in the heart. “We want to boost levels of BAG3 in the heart to address the root cause of this aggressive disease,” Matt

Lee-Sepsick founded Femasys 18 years ago, after executive positions at two other biotechs.