A new play­er in the search for an oral hered­i­tary an­gioede­ma pill has re­ceived a ma­jor boost and show of con­fi­dence.

Phar­varis an­nounced $66 mil­lion in Se­ries B fi­nanc­ing for its B2 re­cep­tor an­tag­o­nist pill, near­ly tripling the fund­ing At­tune Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals re­cent­ly re­ceived in Se­ries B for its own hered­i­tary an­gioede­ma (HAE) pill. The mon­ey will fu­el the com­pa­ny’s Phase I tri­al on its lead com­pound, PHA121, on healthy vol­un­teers. The first sub­jects have al­ready been dosed.

The news comes three-and-a-half months af­ter BioCryst’s great an­gioede­ma fiz­zle. Al­though the Durham out­fit’s oral drug BCX7353 tech­ni­cal­ly passed a Phase III tri­al, the drug failed to cut the at­tack rate by at least 50%, the cut­off at which Wall Street an­a­lysts con­sid­ered the drug mar­ketable, and the biotech’s stock tum­bled.

Hered­i­tary an­gioede­ma, a po­ten­tial­ly life-threat­en­ing ge­net­ic dis­or­der, af­fects 1 in every 50,000 peo­ple. It is char­ac­ter­ized by episodes of ex­treme swelling across the body. It can cause vom­it­ing and nau­sea when man­i­fest in the gut and can even be fa­tal if it ap­pears in the air­ways and re­stricts breath­ing.

Sev­er­al ther­a­pies and in­jec­tions ex­ist to curb the at­tacks, but last year Shire’s Takhzy­ro (lanadelum­ab) emerged as one of the hottest and most ef­fec­tive drugs, con­tribut­ing to an 87% re­duc­tion in mean HAE at­tack fre­quen­cy in a Phase III tri­al (ver­sus a 0% re­duc­tion in the place­bo group) that ush­ered it to­ward mar­ket. The drug is on track to be­come a block­buster. Clair­voy­ant An­a­lyt­ics projects $1.15 bil­lion in sales by 2022.

But be­cause Takhzy­ro is an in­jec­tion, the search is still on for an oral med­ica­tion that can curb the dis­or­der at sim­i­lar rates. BioCryst con­tin­ues to de­vel­op its oral drug, while At­tune Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals re­mains in the ear­ly stage.

HAE is caused by low lev­els of or dys­func­tion­ing C1 es­terase in­hibitor pro­tein. Most avail­able ther­a­pies work by in­hibit­ing C1 es­terase, ful­fill­ing the func­tion of the miss­ing pro­tein. But Phar­varis’ Ph121 works like the FDA-ap­proved icat­i­bant in­jec­tion, which func­tions as an an­tag­o­nist of bradykinin B2 re­cep­tors – i.e. it at­tacks the mol­e­cules that di­rect­ly cause the swelling. The founders of Phar­varis in­clude an in­ven­tor of icat­i­bant and a for­mer mem­ber of the lead­er­ship at Jeri­ni AG, the bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal that sells the in­jec­tion.

Roche broke ground last year when they secured the first FDA approval for a checkpoint therapy in triple-negative breast cancer, a notoriously difficult-to-treat indication that has been passed over by the wave of targeted therapies.

Now, though, doctors are puzzling over why a combination of drugs meant to make that therapy more potent instead appeared to make it less effective.

Roche said Thursday that in a Phase III trial, combining their PD-1/L1 checkpoint therapy Tecentriq with the chemotherapy paclitaxel, did not significantly improve progression-free survival for patients with locally advanced or metastatic triple-negative breast cancer over giving those patients chemotherapy alone. In fact, patients on the Tecentriq-chemo arm had lower overall survival than patients on chemo, although the drugmaker cautioned that the trial was not powered for that endpoint and the data were immature.

A little more than 3 years ago Allergan paid $90 million in a cash upfront to partner with gene editing player Editas on a CRISPR alliance focused on the eye. The lead program centered on LCA10, a rare, inherited retinal degenerative disease that appears in childhood and leads to blindness.

Allergan then went to AbbVie $ABBV in a buyout, and the pharma giant has no interest in moving forward on the gene editing front. The company punted it all back to Editas Thursday, with the biotech $EDIT noting in a statement after the market closed Thursday that it is regaining all rights for its ocular medicines, including EDIT-101.