In a few days, through a series of video conferences, gene therapy researchers around the world will be presenting their latest findings at the virtual annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy. Almost every discussion will feature a topic that has been central to the existence of the field but continues to perplex experts as they seek to refine the modality: the delivery of a gene to the tissue where it’s needed to fix disease.

From Passage Bio’s inception last February to its IPO filing a year later, its close relationship with co-founder Jim Wilson’s Gene Therapy Program at the University of Pennsylvania has always been touted as a major strength. Now the biotech is tying an even tighter knot with its academic partner.

In a deal expansion, Passage nabbed the option to license five more programs coming out of Wilson’s lab and extended the exercise period by three years to 2025. If all the candidates end up making the cut, they will feed 17 new treatments for rare monogenic diseases all the way through clinical development.

BioMarin has just struck a deal to back a Swiss biotech startup with some deep ties to top research institution UCL in London as it beefs up the swelling gene therapy portion of the pipeline.

We don’t have any terms to deal with, just the knowledge that BioMarin CEO JJ Bienaimé saw enough of DiNAQOR’s work to invest in the company as it licenses their lead preclinical program, DiNA-001 for MYBPC3 hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, while collaborating on the rest of the pipeline.

The end of their lead program will, it turns out, spell the end for Novartis spinout resTORbio.

Shares for the once well-funded anti-aging biotech crumbled after its lead program failed a Phase III trial last year. The company said they would shift focus to an early stage Parkinson’s candidate, but that looked like a long shot at the time, and today, the company announced they will reverse merge with Adicet Bio.

With the dermatitis specialists at Forte Biosciences now inhabiting Tocagen’s corporate skeleton, a small San Diego biotech has won rights to its scientific platform.

Denovo Biopharma, a biotech based in San Diego and backed largely by investors in China, will acquire Tocagen’s retro-viral replicating platform, including their former lead gene therapy for brain cancer. The drug, now rebranded as DB107, failed a Phase III clinical trial last year, but Denovo said they saw promising signs in a subset of patients and will use their biomarker platform to select patients they believe the therapy will work on.

In 2004, the Swiss Stock Exchange spawned its biotech index — the Swiss Bio+Medtech Index (SXI) — as the life sciences sector, headlined by large successful biopharma companies Roche and Novartis, took center stage. In the last five years through January 2020, SXI has produced returns of 59%, outperforming both the Swiss Performance Index (31%) and the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index (35%), a new analysis shows.

Add a new, €100 million California facility to the growing gene therapy infrastructure.

Merck KGaA announced they are opening a second gene therapy and viral vector factory in Carlsbad, California. The new center will be just one point in the global supply chain Big Pharma is rapidly erecting to keep manufacturing capacity for the new technology at pace with clinical development. Over the past year, Novartis, PTC Therapeutics, Pfizer and Vertex each announced or opened new facilities in Switzerland, North Carolina and New Jersey that will help build gene therapy.

A month after dosing their first ever patient with their Ionis-licensed tech, Dynacure has announced a new round of funding to advance the trial.

The French biotech announced €50 million ($55 million) in Series C funding, led by Perceptive Advisors. Although listed as a Series C, it is the second tranche of cash the company has ever announced, after their initial $55 million raise in 2018. The cash will float Dynacure through its Phase I/II trial in a class of neuromuscular diseases known as myotubular and centronuclear myopathies.