Ear­ly in 2016 the UK’s Atopix Ther­a­peu­tics was forced to ad­mit that its lead drug, OC459, had failed a mid-stage study for atopic der­mati­tis. But it’s al­so been build­ing on a pos­i­tive set of mid-stage da­ta for eosinophilic asth­ma, and to­day Italy’s Chiesi has bagged the drug and the com­pa­ny in an $82 mil­lion ac­qui­si­tion deal.

Atopix has been square­ly fo­cused on a hot spot in asth­ma re­search. Eosinophilic asth­ma — which is par­tic­u­lar­ly se­vere — is suf­fered by about 40% of the over­all pop­u­la­tion. And it’s been at­tract­ing some pow­er­house at­ten­tion from the top play­ers in the field al­so in­ter­est­ed in Atopix’s fo­cus on a CRTh2 an­tag­o­nist.

The ac­qui­si­tion now puts Chiesi square­ly in the path of the gi­ant No­var­tis $NVS, which al­so has a CRTh2 an­tag­o­nist in de­vel­op­ment. Now in Phase III with a sched­ule to launch in asth­ma in 2019, No­var­tis has been pro­mot­ing fe­vip­iprant as a like­ly game-chang­er in asth­ma, though its one of sev­er­al eosinophil treat­ments now an­gling for the lead in the pipeline.

Boul­der, CO-based Ar­ray Bio­Phar­ma has post­ed pos­i­tive mid-stage da­ta on its own CRTh2 pill AR­RY-502, back in 2014. And As­traZeneca (ben­ral­izum­ab), Glax­o­SmithK­line Nu­cala (mepolizum­ab) and Te­va have all been an­gling for a share of the asth­ma mar­ket with eosoniphilic an­ti­bod­ies that have block­buster po­ten­tial.

Re­port­ing in the pres­ti­gious pages of The Lancet, in­ves­ti­ga­tors say that No­var­tis’ CRTh2 an­tag­o­nist – now in Phase III with a 2019 launch date planned – dra­mat­i­cal­ly re­duced lev­els of eosoniphils. Adding the drug to stan­dard of care mas­sive­ly re­duced the lev­els of eosinophils, which dropped from an av­er­age of 5.4% to 1.1% — near­ly nor­mal – in the tri­al, which en­rolled a to­tal of 61 pa­tients.

Atopix has a di­verse group of back­ers, in­clud­ing SR One, Welling­ton Part­ners, SV Life Sci­ences and MPM Cap­i­tal, Besse­mer Ven­ture Part­ners and Red Abbey Ven­ture Part­ners

The pandemic stock market has proven fruitful for virtually any type of biotech. Now a 7-year-old cell therapy startup will see how much it can yield for a company that specializes in fighting viruses.

AlloVir, a company that until 2019 largely lived off grant money, has filed for a $100 million IPO to back its line of off-the-shelf, virus-fighting T cells. Although in normal circumstances, $100 million could be a solid return for a biotech that got its first major round of funding only last year, we’ll have to wait to see how much the company ultimately earns. As Covid-19 has sent investor money scurrying to almost anyone in drug development, every single biotech to go public this year has prized above their midpoint or upsized their offering, according to Renaissance Capital, sometimes dramatically so.

Following a successful Phase III study in April showcasing the safety and potential of its new sleep drug, Idorsia posted some mixed news in the second Phase III study, but that won’t stop a planned filing aimed at regulatory approval.

The drug, a dual orexin receptor antagonist (DORA) called daridorexant, was found to significantly improve sleep maintenance and subjective total sleep time in 25 mg doses, replicating results from the first Phase III study. However, improvements in sleep onset and daytime functioning narrowly missed statistical significance, despite numerical consistency with the April study.

By the time the FDA finally granted an accelerated OK for Immunomedics’ Trodelvy, we already got a very strong hint that their confirmatory Phase III study in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer was a success.

That’s because the independent data safety monitoring committee recommended that the trial be stopped early. But just what pointed them to the conclusion was still unclear.

“We do not know the totality of their decision other than it’s pretty evident that the primary endpoint was met; otherwise they could not request to halt the study,” Behzad Aghazadeh, the executive chairman, told Endpoints News at the time.