Back in June, GSK paid Alec­tor $700 mil­lion to kick­start an al­liance for rights to two drugs tar­get­ing a range of neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­eases.

The next month, Alec­tor showed via ear­ly da­ta that one of the drugs, an­ti­body AL001 for a ge­net­ic and rapid­ly pro­gress­ing form of de­men­tia, brought lev­els of pro­gran­ulin back to near-nor­mal lev­els af­ter six months in nine pa­tients. Sev­en stayed at near-nor­mal af­ter a year.

And now, Alec­tor is flash­ing some Phase II da­ta at an Alzheimer’s and Parkin­son’s dis­ease con­fer­ence, this time in de­men­tia with a dif­fer­ent type of mu­ta­tion: C9orf72. Re­sults in this co­hort al­so showed el­e­vat­ed lev­els of pro­gran­ulin in both plas­ma and cere­brospinal flu­id while pa­tients were on month­ly treat­ment for a year.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, clin­i­cal as­sess­ments showed a de­lay in an­nu­al­ized dis­ease pro­gres­sion — close to 54%.

“We are en­cour­aged by these find­ings and look for­ward to eval­u­at­ing la­tozinemab in ad­di­tion­al in­di­ca­tions,” Alec­tor’s in­ter­im CMO Sam Jack­son said in a state­ment.

Alec­tor is ac­tive­ly en­rolling a Phase III piv­otal study of the drug in both at-risk and symp­to­matic FTD-GRN pa­tients. Pro­gran­ulin is a pro­tein that reg­u­lates im­mune re­sponse, lyso­so­mal func­tion and neu­ronal sur­vival in the brain,

On­col­o­gy biotech rais­es $40 mil­lion in Se­ries A+ round

A Chi­nese com­pa­ny has nabbed more mon­ey in a new fi­nanc­ing round just 9 months af­ter its Se­ries A, gain­ing its largest raise by all in­di­ca­tions.

Ac­cord­ing to Deal­Stree­tA­sia, Shang­hai biotech Nut­shell Ther­a­peu­tics raised $40 mil­lion thanks to a Se­ries A+ led by Gen­e­sis Cap­i­tal (helmed by for­mer Ten­cent ex­ec­u­tives) and HengXu Cap­i­tal. Sev­er­al ex­ist­ing share­hold­ers jumped on­to the deal as well, in­clud­ing Source Code Cap­i­tal and North­ern Light Ven­ture Cap­i­tal.

While de­tails re­main scant, this is the biotech’s biggest fi­nanc­ing round so far af­ter it raised $15.8 mil­lion in a pre-Se­ries A in De­cem­ber 2020, and then raised $20 mil­lion in a Se­ries A round last June.

The com­pa­ny fo­cus­es on al­losteric drug dis­cov­ery, with a few pre­clin­i­cal drug can­di­dates in its pipeline for colon can­cer, prostate can­cer, breast can­cer and sol­id tu­mors.

GSK, newly branded and soon-to-be demerged, shared interim results from its Phase II trial on its chronic hepatitis B treatment, one that it says has the “potential to lead to a functional cure.”

At a presentation at the EASL International Liver Congress, GSK shared that in around 450 patients who received its hep B drug bepirovirsen for 24 weeks, just under 30% had hepatitis B surface antigen and viral DNA levels that were too low to detect.

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.

Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision on Friday to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years, Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to somewhat reassure women that states will not be able to ban the prescription drug sometimes used for abortions.

Following the decision, the New England Journal of Medicine also published an editorial strongly condemning the reversal, saying it “serves American families poorly, putting their health, safety, finances, and futures at risk.”

The story of Amryt Pharma’s candidate for the genetic skin condition epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, will soon enter another chapter.

After the Irish drugmaker’s candidate, dubbed Oleogel-S10 and marketed as Filsuvez, was handed a CRL earlier this year, the company announced in a press release that it plans to submit a formal dispute resolution request for the company’s NDA for Oleogel-S10.

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis made a name for himself in the 2020 election cycle as the darling of the pharma industry, accepting hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions, even from the likes of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

Those contributions have led Tillis to attempt to re-write patent laws in pharma’s favor, a move which failed to gain steam in 2019, and request for a third time since January that the FDA should help stop “the false narrative that patent protections are to blame for high drug prices.”