| | | |   | Good morning, everyone. Damian here with a reminder that you can join my colleague Ed Silverman this afternoon for a live conversation about the long-delayed arrival of biosimilar competition for the drug industry's most lucrative products and the debate over just how meteoric that moment might be. Sign up here. | | | The next act for one of biotech's few 2022 winners Athena Countouriotis, formerly the CEO of Turning Point Therapeutics, will become chair of Capstan Pharmaceuticals, creating one of the few companies where both the chair of the board of directors and the CEO are women.
“It really has changed, but we remember when there were no women on the board,” said Laura Shawver, Capstan’s CEO. “We remember walking into a room and we would be the only woman in the room.”
The two had known each other for years — Shawver describes Countouriotis as “fierce” — but had not previously worked together. When the two were featured together in a newspaper profile in 2019, Shawver commented afterward that Countouriotis would be the first to sell her company. That was incorrect. Synthorx, then run by Shawver, was purchased by Sanofi for $2.5 billion in 2019. Turning Point was purchased for $4.1 billion by Bristol Myers Squibb earlier this year.
Shawver said a recruiter had brought her a list of potential chairs that did not include Countouriotis’ name and she mentioned it. Countouriotis said she got a text from Shawver while visiting a sick relative and instantly signed on. “Do I get to work with you?” Countouriotis asked on the first call.
Capstan, which is working on engineering cells into cell therapies without removing them from the body, also announced that it is raising $165 million in venture capital. Countouriotis has also started a new company, Avenzo Therapeutics, with her chief medical officer from Turning Point. That company has raised about $170 million to develop new cancer drugs, she said, although the identities of investors aren’t being disclosed. | A well-funded biotech quietly calls it quits Triplet Therapeutics, co-founded in 2019 by the A-list investor Atlas Ventures, quietly closed up shop after struggling to raise a follow-on investment.
As STAT’s Allison DeAngelis reports, Triplet set out to find treatments for genetic disorders including Huntington’s disease, raising a $59 million Series A round with the goal of starting its first clinical trial in 2021. But the high-profile failure of two rival efforts to treat Huntington’s and a pullback in private biotech funding made it difficult for the company to attract investors.
Triplet’s demise comes on the heels of years of frustration for patients and families dealing with Huntington’s, a neurodegenerative disorder that has baffled drug developers despite years of research into its underlying genetic cause.
Read more. | Biotech investors and CEOs see two paths to growth, but are they equally viable? The biotech market is changing and the interplay of investors, private and public markets will be important going forward. Is optimism for the biotech market’s rebound warranted? Dr. Chen Yu, Founder and Managing Partner of TCG Crossover, discusses with RBC’s Noël Brown, Head of US Biotechnology Investment Banking. Get their perspectives on the biotech market’s road ahead and the two paths for company scale-up strategies. | Biotech stocks still go up sometimes Yesterday, Dice Therapeutics reported what, for small biotech companies, counts as good news: In a first clinical trial, its lead psoriasis drug performed substantially better than placebo. And then, bucking a trend that has dogged biotech firms all year, the stock price went up.
Dice’s positive data came from an analysis of just 32 patients, only eight of whom received the high dose that dramatically beat placebo. The lower tested dose showed no benefit over four weeks, and there’s no guarantee the observed effect of the higher dose will be replicable in larger, longer studies.
And yet Dice’s stock price rose nearly 70% on the news and held up through yesterday’s close, leading the company to announce a $250 million public offering. That sort of thing used to be commonplace, but in 2022, with the banner biotech index still down more than 30% and companies routinely punished for self-described good news, Dice’s experience suggests the market is starting to thaw. | The dream of a nasal Covid vaccine hits a snag The miraculously rapid development of injectable vaccines for Covid-19 has saved lives around the world, but the dream of preventing spread and infection would require vaccines that do their work where the virus takes hold: in the mucus membranes of the nose, mouth, and throat.
But actually developing intranasal Covid vaccines is easier said than done. Yesterday, AstraZeneca and its partners at Oxford University said an inhalable version of their effective injectable vaccine failed to generate an antibody response in the majority of subjects in a Phase 1 trial. Researchers have chosen to abandon the formulation in favor of different approaches.
Other research groups are developing inhalable vaccines that use live but weakened viruses to teach the immune system to recognize SARS-CoV-2 at the site of infection. That means searching for a Goldilocks dosage that is potent enough to trigger an immune reaction but not so powerful that people get sick simply by getting vaccinated, a balance that has so far been elusive. | More reads - AstraZeneca looks to cancer, RSV drugs for growth as Covid-vaccine demand wanes, Wall Street Journal
- Even as large health systems bleed money, children’s hospitals are faring well, STAT
- Amgen climbs after analyst says weight loss drug shows promise, Bloomberg
| Thanks for reading! Until tomorrow,  | | | |
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