Oncology
The next act for a biotech rainmaker
Jean Cui's last company, the oncology-focused Turning Point Therapeutics, got sold to Bristol Myers Squibb for $4 billion. That helped make her next venture, focused on cancer drugs that can counteract tumors' evolution, an easy sell to investors.
As STAT's Matthew Herper reports, the firm is called BlossomHill Therapeutics, and it just raised $100 million from a syndicate including Colt Ventures, Cormorant Asset Management, and OrbiMed. The idea, Cui said, is to break the mold of drug design, building new molecules from scratch that could be less susceptible to cancer cells developing resistance. Among her targets is a competitor to AstraZeneca's Tagrisso, one of the best-selling cancer pills on the market.
The allure, investors said, rests on Cui's track record. At Turning Point, she was key to the invention of the targeted therapy that eventually won FDA approval and drew Bristol's interest. Earlier in her career, at Pfizer, she did cornerstone work on two approved cancer medicines. "It's actually all about her," said Cormorant's Bihua Chen.
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Biotech
Cell therapy for the brain
Just as engineered cells have led to dramatic benefits for certain cancers, scientists are working to bring a similar technology to disease of the central nervous system, potentially repairing the damage of neurodegenerative disease.
Kenai Therapeutics, a San Diego biotech startup, is working to do just that in Parkinson's disease. As STAT's Allison DeAngelis reports, the company raised an $82 million Series A to fund the development of off-the-shelf cell therapies crafted from donor stem cells. Kenai expects to advance its first therapy into a clinical trial later this year.
The company, whose investors include Cure Ventures, plans to build a pipeline of cell therapies for other neurological diseases. "What excited me originally, is the ability to extend this beyond Parkinson's," said Jeff Jonas, a partner at Cure Ventures. "Parkinson's really is, in ways, a sentinel indication that may allow greater expansion into other CNS indications."
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Obesity
Novo's chasing a 'vaccine-like' version of Wegovy
Novo Nordisk can barely make enough of Wegovy to satisfy demand for the dramatically effective obesity treatment. But scientists in the company's research ranks are already at work on a moonshot treatment that would render that weekly injection obsolete.
As STAT's Elaine Chen reports, Novo has set up a Boston-area science hub devoted to next-generation medicines, including obesity products that might function more like preventive therapies than weight-loss treatments.
"We have a very early think tank on: what would it take us, from a technology point of view and from an ecosystem point of view, to make long-lasting GLP-1 molecules?" Novo's Chief Scientific Officer Marcus Schindler said in an interview with STAT yesterday. "Could we think about vaccine-like properties, where imagine you had, once a year, an injection with an equivalent of a GLP-1 that really helps you to maintain weight loss and have cardiovascular benefits?"
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