Affinia Therapeutics has ditched its plans to go public in a relatively closed-door market that has not favored Nasdaq debuts for the drug development industry most of this year. A pandemic surge in 2020 and 2021 opened the doors for many preclinical startups, which caught Affinia’s attention and gave the gene therapy biotech confidence in the beginning days of 2022 to send in its S-1.
But on Friday, Affinia threw in the S-1 towel and concluded now is not the time to step onto Wall Street. The biotech has put out few public announcements since the spring of this year. Endpoints News picked the startup as one of its 11 biotechs to watch last year.
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Avalon Ventures has been a major player in the investing games both in tech and in the biotech world, but now a new fund will be zeroed in on investing in the life science field.
Christened Avalon BioVentures, the venture capital firm will be committed to investing in early-stage biomedical companies and has officially closed the fund with $135 million on hand from new and existing investors. The company will be focused specifically on the life science space only and emerging from Avalon’s tech and life science approach. The company will continue to “leverage” Avalon’s team and accelerator; Avalon founder Kevin Kinsella will be brought in as an emeritus partner.
Biotech incubator Star Therapeutics has launched another galaxy-themed drug developer, which next year will test a new antibody in a bleeding disorder currently treated by Takeda’s Vonvendi.
Star lined up a who’s who of biotech venture capital firms to line Vega Therapeutics’ coffers with $40 million. The funds will bankroll a Phase I study early next year as the biotech recently got the go-ahead from Austrian authorities, CEO Adam Rosenthal told Endpoints News in a preview of the unveiling. The biotech will test whether a monoclonal antibody can treat one of the most common forms of inherited bleeding disorders: von Willebrand disease, or VWD.
Entact Bio has secured $81 million in a Series A round to push forward its platform for developing therapies that can enhance the function of proteins that are crucial to fight disease.
Known as enhancement-targeting chimeric (ENTAC) molecules, Entact’s idea is to use the drug platform in the treatment of certain cancers, inflammatory diseases and rare genetic disorders associated with haploinsufficiences, in which patients have too little of a protein in their cells. Because ENTACs are small molecules, they can be orally delivered and are much cheaper to manufacture.
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Having steered a PI3K inhibitor from preclinical studies all the way to Phase II, San Diego’s MEI Pharma is all but washing its hands of the drug as the FDA raises the bar on the class.
The biotech is discontinuing development of zandelisib everywhere except Japan, where its partner Kyowa Kirin will move forward with ongoing trials and explore an approval based on Phase II data. While MEI Pharma had originally hoped to do the same in the US, the FDA put its foot down and asked for a new clinical trial — which it decided isn’t worth the effort.
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Pfizer is continuing its run of manufacturing site expansions with two new large investments in the US and Europe.
The New York-based pharma giant’s site in Kalamazoo, MI, has seen a lot of attention over the past year. As a major piece of the manufacturing network for Covid-19 vaccines and antivirals, Pfizer is gearing up to place more money into the site. Pfizer announced it will place $750 million into the facility, mainly to establish “modular aseptic processing” (MAP) production and create around 300 jobs at the site.
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The prognosis is poor for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) patients. Novartis wants to change that by making its recently approved Pluvicto available to patients earlier in their course of treatment.
The Swiss pharma giant unveiled Phase III results Monday suggesting that Pluvicto was able to halt disease progression in certain prostate cancer patients when administered after androgen-receptor pathway inhibitor (ARPI) therapy, but without prior taxane-based chemotherapy. The drug is currently approved for patients after they’ve received both ARPI and chemo.
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