Olivia Vizier

With so many headlines touting drugs in development for the likes of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, an illness in the same ballpark has been back-seated: alcoholic hepatitis (AH), which is on the rise, under-recognized and brings a one-month mortality rate that averages 26%.

ProQR Therapeutics has encouraging early data from a small study that show its experimental RNA-based therapy for a rare, inherited form of vision loss helped patients recover some of their sight. Based on those results, the company is planning to advance its therapy to two pivotal studies that could start later this year.

Dr. Sudarshan Hebbar, Chief Medical Officer, CalciMedica talks about developing drugs that are focused on targeting CRAC channels, calcium release activated calcium channels, in order to modulate these channels to help treat diseases that have a significant inflammatory component.  Initially developed drugs for acute pancreatitis targeting both the pancreas and the lung. Now conducting large

That is the mission of Clene Nanomedicine, which has combined cell biology, solid state physics, and materials science to pioneer the development of Clean-Surfaced Nanocrystal (CSN) therapeutics. The company’s goal is to use this process to enhance the energetic support in neurons and change the way neurodegenerative diseases are treated. PM360 spoke with President and CEO Rob

Chiasma has released phase 3 data supporting its belief that acromegaly patients will prefer to take its oral formulation over existing long-acting injectables.

How it works: The San Francisco–based company engineered a common cold virus called an adenovirus to carry instructions for making two coronavirus proteins into human cells.  There, the proteins can be made to prime the immune system to later fend off the coronavirus.

Anima specializes in treating targets long viewed as “undruggable” by targeting cellular mechanisms that regulate mRNA translation of proteins with specific biological roles in coordinating and regulating translation of individual mRNAs and pathways . . .

Gain Therapeutics has priced its initial public offering, raising more than $40 million for its computational drug discovery platform and pipeline of drugs for diseases associated with protein misfolding. 

Pyxis CEO Lara Sullivan has struck a deal with her former employer, Pfizer, that adds two preclinical therapies to the biotech’s pipeline as well as a license to the pharma’s ADC platform. 

The Japanese company put down another marker in the disease today by teaming up with the private Israeli company Anima Biotech, in a transaction worth $120m up front.

New Orleans-based Revolo Biotherapeutics, formerly known as Immune Regulation, rebranded to reflect its revolutionary scientific approach to dramatically alter the autoimmune and allergic disease treatment landscape.

Anima Biotech’s strategic collaboration with Takeda Pharmaceutical, just announced today, uses its novel platform for discovery of mRNA translation modulators to discover and develop a new class of therapies for neurological diseases.

The next generation of COVID-19 vaccines will not only tackle viral variants but also provide solutions across the globe at a fraction of the cost.

Biotech company Valneva is manufacturing a Covid-19 vaccine at its plant in West Lothian, which is currently going through clinical trials.

SOTIO — highlighted a variety of ways the industry could address the high cost of making these therapies. Despite the fact each of these experts is focused on different types of cell therapies (allogenic and/or autologous) and therapeutic indications, their mindset was strikingly aligned around just how innovative a simplified C&G therapy manufacturing process would

If you’re not a fan of needles, how about a vaccine you take with a glass of water? That’s what San Francisco biotechnology company Vaxart is working on.

Acepodia closed its Series B round Tuesday morning, hoping to build upon CEO Sonny Hsiao’s work from when he was a biologist at UC Berkeley. The biotech plans to use the funds to advance its lead program through the end of a Phase I trial and launch a Phase II study, as well as to

A relevant topic in the healthcare space that has arisen amid the COVID-19 pandemic is the alarming drop in cancer screening rates globally due to limited access of patients to hospitals settings and cancellations of non-elective procedures, which will inevitably result in increased cancer deaths in coming years. The pandemic has reemphasized the relevance of

Only four years after its foundation, Acepodia Inc. raised $47 million in a series B financing round. The funds will help the oncology company move its first cell therapy candidate to phase II trials, while expanding its research and development activities with other products from its tech platform.

California-based CalciMedica closed a Series D round on Thursday to advance its portfolio of calcium release-activated calcium (CRAC) inhibitors, including Auxora, which is being tested in both Covid-19 and acute pancreatitis patients.

The push abroad raises fresh concerns over clinical trials exploiting economically developing nations. Vaxart, maker of a potential Covid vaccine that comes in tablet form, is gearing up for a Phase II trial. The company plans to consult foreign ministries of health and ethics committees to set up ethical trials. That might include a crossover study that

Mark Mortenson, CSO of Clene Nanomedicine, discusses the use of proprietary gold nanocrystals as catalysts to prevent the progression of, and act as a treatment for, neurodegenerative disease.

Sotio’s cell platform, called DCVAC, starts with a patient’s peripheral blood mononuclear cells, which are grown into dendritic cells (DCs). In parallel, the company uses a proprietary device to pressurize tumor cells from cell lines, and the right amount of HHP makes the cells more immunogenic. The company picks “cell lines with expression profiles that

As the superbug crisis heats up around the world, Scynexis says it has new data from two interim analyses that prove its antifungal has the potential to treat a broad range of infections.

X4 Pharmaceuticals is developing a class of small molecule therapeutics that work as antagonists of chemokine receptor, CXCR4, the disruption of which is implicated in a number of primary immunodeficiencies (PIs) and cancers.

That’s the question a new biotech is aiming to answer, as SalioGen Therapeutics emerges from stealth Monday morning with a $20 million Series A. And they believe they’ve found a new delivery system that can more precisely deliver genes in vivo than the relatively large adeno-associated virus or CRISPR system: mammalian-derived enzymes.

Cidara Therapeutics is exploring echinocandin derivatives. The company’s clinical candidate rezafungin is a derivative of anidulafungin, a compound originally discovered at Eli Lilly and Company and currently marketed by Pfizer. Chemists placed a choline group at a critical point on the molecule, a feature that stabilizes the echinocandin ring and prevents metabolic breakdown of the molecule,