Al­ler­gan en­lists Ex­i­cure in search of hair loss drugs with $25M up­front, dou­bling down on area dear to Ab­b­Vie

Af­ter Ab­b­Vie be­came a for­mi­da­ble play­er in med­ical aes­thet­ics overnight by swal­low­ing Al­ler­gan, the Botox mak­er is beef­ing up the pipeline with new R&D projects.

The lat­est deal brings in the gene ex­pres­sion ex­perts at Ex­i­cure, who is re­ceiv­ing $25 mil­lion up­front to dis­cov­er and de­vel­op two new treat­ments for hair loss dis­or­ders. Uti­liz­ing its spher­i­cal nu­cle­ic acid (SNA) tech­nol­o­gy, the biotech starts with an ar­ti­fi­cial nanos­phere as a scaf­fold, as­sem­bling sin­gle- and dou­ble-strand­ed nu­cle­ic acids on the sur­face to find mol­e­cules that could mod­u­late an­ti­sense or RNAi path­ways.

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