Im­muno­core ap­pears to be the lat­est domi­no to fall around Neil Wood­ford’s de­ba­cle as it so­lic­its new back­ing at a dras­ti­cal­ly low­er val­u­a­tion.

Eliot Forster F-star

Once a star in the UK biotech scene, Im­muno­core fetched $320 mil­lion to launch a sprawl­ing op­er­a­tion around TCR re­search and its val­u­a­tion had once reached near­ly $1 bil­lion (£800m). But that fig­ure has been slashed to around $621 mil­lion (£500 mil­lion) in its lat­est fi­nanc­ing, the Tele­graph re­port­ed.

New York-based Gen­er­al At­lantic has com­mit­ted an ini­tial £60 mil­lion to what is shap­ing up to be a £100 mil­lion round, the news­pa­per added.

Signs of trou­ble at Im­muno­core first emerged well be­fore the Wood­ford fall­out. Eliot Forster hit the ex­it last Feb­ru­ary just as he was sup­pos­ed­ly putting to­geth­er an­oth­er megaround for the com­pa­ny, and an ex­ec­u­tive ex­o­dus fol­lowed. Sev­er­al peo­ple fa­mil­iar with in­ter­nal talks pre­vi­ous­ly told End­points News that the biotech was hav­ing a hard time stick­ing with its high-end uni­corn val­u­a­tion, lead­ing to the de­par­tures.

Bahi­ja Jal­lal

Bahi­ja Jal­lal, for­mer pres­i­dent of the now-de­funct Med­Im­mune unit at As­traZeneca, has since tak­en over as CEO. Re­as­sur­ance to in­vestors and sta­bil­i­ty would be key to her tenure, she said when she joined in Jan­u­ary.

Wood­ford’s high pro­file in­volve­ment with the com­pa­ny didn’t help. A cut in Im­muno­core’s val­u­a­tion could put more strain on Wood­ford as he looks to cash out some pri­vate hold­ings in search of liq­uid­i­ty for his Eq­ui­ty In­come fund, which was abrupt­ly sus­pend­ed back in June. He has vowed to re­open the fund in De­cem­ber — pro­vid­ed he se­cures enough cash to meet any re­demp­tions that dis­grun­tled in­vestors would re­quest once they get the chance.

In an in­ter­im re­port pub­lished in Ju­ly, the fund put the val­ue of its Im­muno­core shares at £23 mil­lion, down from £45 mil­lion at the end of last year.

Adam Stoten Ox­ford

Co-in­vestors have blamed Wood­ford for steep drops in the over­all val­ue of some biotechs their port­fo­lios share with his, as his well-pub­li­cized woes shake oth­ers’ con­fi­dence in com­pa­nies he has stakes in. Most re­cent­ly, Benev­o­len­tAI bagged $90 mil­lion with its val­u­a­tion halved. Ox­ford Nanopore, a DNA se­quenc­ing com­pa­ny, is al­so ap­par­ent­ly be­ing prepped for auc­tion.

Adam Stoten, the chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer at Ox­ford Uni­ver­si­ty’s spin­out of­fice, said in an in­ter­view with the Tele­graph they are hav­ing to “weath­er the storm” and di­ver­si­fy their in­vestor base af­ter years of re­ceiv­ing in­vest­ment from Wood­ford.

Celyad’s view on developing and delivering a CAR T-cell therapy with multi-tumor specificity combined with cell manufacturing success
Overview
Transitioning potential therapeutic assets from academia into the commercial environment is an exercise that is largely underappreciated by stakeholders, except for drug developers themselves. The promise of preclinical or early clinical results drives enthusiasm, but the pragmatic delivery of a therapy outside of small, local testing is most often a major challenge for drug developers especially, including among other things, the manufacturing challenges that surround the production of just-in-time and personalized autologous cell therapy products.

As J&J attempts to jostle past Bristol-Myers Squibb and bluebird for a landmark approval of its anti-BCMA CAR-T — and while GlaxoSmithKline maps a quick path to the FDA riding on its own BCMA-targeting antibody-drug conjugates — the bispecifics are arriving on the scene to stake a claim for a market that could cross $10 billion per year.

The main rivalry in multiple myeloma is shaping up to be one between Regeneron and Bristol-Myers, which picked up a bispecific antibody to BCMA through its recently closed $74 billion takeover of Celgene. Both presented promising first-in-human data at the ASH 2019 meeting.

It’s been a difficult few years for gene and cell therapy startup Abeona Therapeutics. Its newly crowned chief Carsten Thiel was forced out last year following accusations of unspecified “personal misconduct,” and this September, the FDA imposed a clinical hold on its therapy for a form of “butterfly” disease. But things are beginning to perk up. On Monday, the company said the regulator had lifted its hold and the experimental therapy is now set to be evaluated in a late-stage study.

Merck’s 2017 bet on KalVista Pharmaceuticals may have soured, after the UK/US-based biotech’s lead drug failed a mid-stage study in patients with diabetic macular edema (DME).

Two doses of the intravitreal injection, KVD001, were tested against a placebo in a 129-patient trial. Patients who continued to experience significant inflammation and diminished visual acuity, despite anti-VEGF therapy, were recruited to the trial. Typically patients with DME — the most frequent cause of vision loss related to diabetes — are treated with anti-VEGF therapies such as Regeneron’s flagship Eylea or Roche’s Avastin and Lucentis.

About a month after the Swiss biotech disclosed a failed late-stage study in its IVF program, ObsEva on Monday unveiled positive pivotal data on its experimental treatment for heavy menstrual bleeding triggered by uterine fibroids.

ObsEva in-licensed the drug, linzagolix, from Japan’s Kissei Pharmaceutical in 2015. Two doses of the drug (100 mg and 200 mg) were tested against a placebo in the 535-patient Phase III study, dubbed PRIMROSE 2, in patients who were both on and off hormonal add-back therapy (ABT).

Bristol-Myers Squibb came to ASH this past weekend with a variety of messages on the new cancer drugs they had acquired in the big Celgene buyout, including liso-cel, the lead CAR-T program picked up in the $9 billion Juno acquisition. And one of the most important was that they had the pivotal efficacy and safety data needed to snag an approval from the FDA next year, with the BLA on track for a filing this month.