A day af­ter Eli Lil­ly inked a $1 bil­lion-plus deal to part­ner with a qui­et RNA edit­ing start­up, a new play­er has emerged to turn up the vol­ume.

ADARx Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals un­cloaked on Thurs­day with a $75 mil­lion Se­ries B round to ush­er its RNA pro­grams in­to the clin­ic. The San Diego-based biotech was found­ed in 2019 to dis­cov­er ther­a­pies that pre­cise­ly tar­get and ed­it sin­gle-point mu­ta­tions on RNA tran­scripts.

Un­like gene edit­ing, which looks to di­rect­ly — and per­ma­nent­ly – al­ter DNA, the goal of RNA edit­ing is to in­ter­cept the bro­ken mes­sages sent out by the DNA of pa­tients with cer­tain dis­eases and cor­rect it be­fore it gets turned in­to pro­teins. To do so, sci­en­tists are ex­ploit­ing a nat­u­ral­ly oc­cur­ring en­zyme called ADAR, or adeno­sine deam­i­nas­es act­ing on RNA.

ADARx’s first edit­ing pro­gram is be­ing de­vel­oped for Al­pha-1 an­tit­rypsin de­fi­cien­cy (AAT de­fi­cien­cy), an in­her­it­ed con­di­tion in which AAT, a pro­tein that pro­tects the lungs, isn’t the cor­rect shape and gets stuck in the liv­er where it’s pro­duced. Pa­tients with AAT de­fi­cien­cy are at an in­creased risk for both lung and liv­er dis­ease.

The team is helmed by Zhen Li, who led siR­NA de­vel­op­ment at Mer­ck be­fore tak­ing the se­nior VP role at Ar­row­head Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals in 2014. Rui Zhu, a for­mer Ar­row­head col­league, al­so hopped on board as VP of R&D.

“We are ex­cit­ed that our RNA base edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy could give rise to a sig­nif­i­cant pipeline of high­ly ef­fec­tive ther­a­peu­tics,” Li said in a state­ment, adding that the com­pa­ny is al­so work­ing on tech for in­hi­bi­tion, degra­da­tion and de­liv­ery across a range of ge­net­ic, car­diometa­bol­ic and cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem dis­eases.

The RNA edit­ing space is heat­ing up, with Roche tee­ing up a $3 bil­lion-plus deal for Shape’s RNA edit­ing plat­form back in Au­gust. The deal came on the heels of Shape’s $112 mil­lion Se­ries B round in Ju­ly, with Roche hop­ing to dis­cov­er po­ten­tial “one-time” cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkin­son’s and oth­er rare dis­eases. And just yes­ter­day, Eli Lil­ly put down $50 mil­lion up­front and $1.25 bil­lion in biobucks for ac­cess to five RNA edit­ing can­di­dates from the Dutch biotech Pro­QR Ther­a­peu­tics.

“Or­biMed is pleased to con­tin­ue to back Zhen Li and her team in the cre­ation of an ex­cit­ing oligonu­cleotide-based drug com­pa­ny, which is cre­at­ing new treat­ment modal­i­ties,” said Carl Gor­don, found­ing part­ner at Or­biMed, which co-led ADARx’s Se­ries B round along with SR One Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment. Sirona Cap­i­tal and Lil­ly Asia Ven­tures al­so chipped in.

A lack of diversity in clinical trials has persisted despite decades of initiatives to try to turn the tide.

In a recent review of 17 years of clinical trials, drugmaker GSK found that there were some mismatches between the demographics of its US-based trials and how prevalent diseases were in those populations.

The results, the company says, will help GSK and others design studies that better represent epidemiological rates within races and ethnicities.

Following a promise last year to go “big and fast in breast cancer,” Gilead has secured a win for Trodelvy in the most common form.

The drug was approved to treat HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer patients who’ve already received endocrine-based therapy and at least two other systemic therapies for metastatic cancer, Gilead announced on Friday.

Trodelvy won its first indication in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer back in 2020, and has since added urothelial cancer to the list. HR-positive HER2-negative breast cancer accounts for roughly 70% of new breast cancer cases worldwide per year, according to senior VP of oncology clinical development Bill Grossman, and many patients develop resistance to endocrine-based therapies or worsen on chemotherapy.

Prescription drug discount provider GoodRx will no longer be allowed to share its users’ sensitive health data with advertisers after the Federal Trade Commission charged the online coupon provider with failing to notify consumers of such disclosures to Facebook, Google, and other companies.

GoodRx agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty for violating the FTC’s Health Breach Notification Rule after the FTC said it repeatedly violated a 2017 promise to not share sensitive personal health information. The FTC alleged that the company shared users’ prescription medications and personal health conditions with third party advertisers and platforms like Facebook, Google, Criteo, Branch and Twilio.