Akcea’s top 3 C-suite execs are chopped out as Ionis sends in an interim quarterback from their bench

September 23, 2019 07:50 AM EDTUpdated 09:51 AM

Akcea’s top 3 C-suite execs are chopped out as Ionis sends in an interim quarterback from their bench

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

The top 3 execs running Ionis’ majority-owned spinoff Akcea are hitting the exit in a surprise twist Monday morning.

Akcea $AKCA reported this morning that CEO Paula Soteropoulos, President Sarah Boyce and COO Jeffrey Goldberg are out in a clean sweep. The board has placed Damien McDevitt — the chief business officer on the mother ship — in the interim chief executive spot as they hunt for some permanent replacements. Michael J. Yang and Joseph ‘Skip’ Klein III, meanwhile have joined the company’s board of directors,

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Targeting a Potential Vulnerability of Certain Cancers with DNA Damage Response

Andree Blaukat

Every individual’s DNA is unique, and because of this, every patient responds differently to disease and treatment. It is astonishing how four tiny building blocks of our DNA – A, T, C, G – dictate our health, disease, and how we age.

The tricky thing about DNA is that it is constantly exposed to damage by sources such as ultraviolet light, certain chemicals, toxins, and even natural biochemical processes inside our cells.¹ If ignored, DNA damage will accumulate in replicating cells, giving rise to mutations that can lead to premature aging, cancer, and other diseases.

February 26, 2021 07:00 AM ESTUpdated 09:51 AM

Deals

Roivant parlays a $450M chunk of equity in biotech buyout, grabbing a computational group to drive discovery work

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

New Roivant CEO Matt Gline has crafted an all-equity upfront deal to buy out a Boston-based biotech that has been toiling for several years now at building a supercomputing-based computational platform to design new drugs. And he’s adding it to the Erector set of science operations that are being built up to support their network of biotech subsidiaries with an eye to growing the pipeline in a play to create a new kind of pharma company.

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February 25, 2021 08:31 AM ESTUpdated 09:46 AM

Editor's note

Follow biotechs going public with the Endpoints News IPO Tracker

Max Gelman

Associate Editor

The Endpoints News team is continuing to track IPO filings for 2021, and we’ve designed a new tracker page for the effort.

Check it out here: Biopharma IPOs 2021 from Endpoints News

You’ll be able to find all the biotechs that have filed and priced so far this year, sortable by quarter and listed by newest first. As of the time of publishing on Feb. 25, there have already been 16 biotechs debuting on Nasdaq so far this year, with an additional four having filed their S-1 paperwork.

Ken Frazier, Merck CEO (Bess Adler/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

February 25, 2021 07:43 AM ESTUpdated 10:46 AM

Deals

Pharma

UPDATED: Merck takes a swing at the IL-2 puzzlebox with a $1.85B play for buzzy Pandion and its autoimmune hopefuls

Kyle Blankenship

Managing Editor

When Roger Perlmutter bid farewell to Merck late last year, the drugmaker perhaps best known now for sales giant Keytruda signaled its intent to take a swing at early-stage novelty with the appointment of discovery head Dean Li. Now, Merck is signing a decent-sized check to bring an IL-2 moonshot into the fold.

Merck will shell out roughly $1.85 billion for Pandion Pharmaceuticals, a biotech hoping to gin up regulatory T cells (Tregs) to treat a range of autoimmune disorders, the drugmaker said Thursday.

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February 26, 2021 10:03 AM ESTUpdated 11:59 AM

Deals

R&D

Genentech plots $53M discovery quest aimed at sparking a 'Holy moly' pivot in neuro R&D

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Genentech has committed $53 million to back a 10-year quest aimed at going back to the drawing board to use new technology and fresh scientific insights to generate a pipeline of drugs for neurological diseases.

Roche’s big South San Francisco hub will mix it up with the scientists drawn together for the Weill Neurohub — formed in 2019 as a joint research partnership involving UCSF, Berkeley and the University of Washington — in an exploration of the field to develop new therapies for some of the toughest diseases in drug R&D: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, ALS and autism.

February 26, 2021 09:00 AM EST

R&D

Amgen, AstraZeneca speed toward filing next-gen antibody for asthma after uncorking full late-stage data

Kyle Blankenship

Managing Editor

On the hunt for a novel competitor to Sanofi and Regeneron’s Dupixent in severe asthma, Amgen and AstraZeneca posted “exciting” results from their next-gen antibody late last year. Now, the partners are showing their hands, and the results look good enough for approval.

Amgen and AstraZeneca’s tezepelumab plus standard of care cut the rate of severe asthma attacks by 56% at the one-year mark compared with SOC alone, according to full data from the Phase III NAVIGATOR study presented Friday at the virtual American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology meeting. And those significant results were consistent regardless of patients’ baseline eosinophil counts.

February 26, 2021 06:27 AM ESTUpdated 09:50 AM

People

With dust settled on activist attack, Laurence Cooper leaves Ziopharm to a new board

Amber Tong

Senior Editor

Laurence Cooper has done his part.

In the five years since he left a tenured position at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center to become CEO of Boston-based Ziopharm, he’s steered the small-cap immunotherapy player through patient deaths in trials, clinical holds, short attacks and, most recently, an activist attack on the board.

So when the company has “fantastic news” like an IND clearance for a TCR T cell therapy program, he’s ready to pass on the baton.

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Tal Zaks, Moderna CMO (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi, via still image from video)

February 25, 2021 09:17 AM EST

R&D

Manufacturing

CMO Tal Zaks bids Moderna a surprise adieu as biotech projects $18.4B in revenue, plots post-Covid expansion

Jason Mast

Editor

How do you exit a company after six years in style? Developing one of the most lucrative and life-saving products in pharma history is probably not the worst way to go.

Tal Zaks, Moderna’s CMO since 2015, will leave the mRNA biotech in September, the biotech disclosed in their annual report this morning. The company has already retained the recruitment firm Russell Reynolds to find a replacement.

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February 25, 2021 07:00 AM EST

R&D

Coronavirus

GlaxoSmithKline rethinks strategy for Covid-19 antibody — not the Vir ones — after trial flop. Is there hope in high-risk patients?

Kyle Blankenship

Managing Editor

In the search for a better Covid-19 therapeutic, GlaxoSmithKline and Vir have partnered up on two antibodies they hope have a chance. GSK is also testing its own in-house antibody, and early results may have shut the door on its widespread use.

A combination of GSK’s monoclonal antibody otilimab plus standard of care couldn’t best standard of care alone in preventing death and respiratory failure in hospitalized Covid-19 patients after 28 days, according to data from the Phase IIa OSCAR study unveiled Thursday.