→ Daré Bio­science is the lat­est biotech to pull off a re­verse merg­er. The com­pa­ny is tak­ing over Cerulean, leav­ing it with a ma­jor­i­ty of the stock and a list­ing on Nas­daq for its women’s health ef­fort. Cerulean, mean­while, sold CR­LX101 and CR­LX301 to a sub­sidiary of NewLink and laid off 11 staffers, leav­ing 8 em­ploy­ees. Last sum­mer Cerulean’s lead drug went 0 for 2 in mid-stage tri­als, blast­ing any re­main­ing hope of suc­cess and forc­ing the com­pa­ny to lay off half of its staff.

→ The UK’s Pul­mo­cide has raised a $30.4 mil­lion B round. The mon­ey will be ear­marked for its R&D work on a new ther­a­py for RSV as well as pul­monary as­pergillo­sis. New in­vestor SR One led the round in a syn­di­cate that in­clud­ed Long­wood Fund plus ex­ist­ing in­vestors SV Life Sci­ences, F-Prime Cap­i­tal, John­son & John­son In­no­va­tion – JJDC, Inc. and Touch­stone In­no­va­tions plc. “This Se­ries B fundrais­ing will pro­vide us with the cap­i­tal to ad­vance our two nov­el com­pounds through ear­ly clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment; an­oth­er step clos­er to a treat­ment for pa­tients for these de­bil­i­tat­ing in­fec­tions,” said CEO Garth Rape­port.

→ Waltham, MA-based X-Chem has forged a drug dis­cov­ery col­lab­o­ra­tion with Astel­las Phar­ma, bag­ging a $16 mil­lion up­front. Mile­stone pay­ments range up to $100 mil­lion on each pro­gram.

→ France’s AB Sci­ences saw its shares bounce high­er this morn­ing af­ter an­nounc­ing that a Phase II/III study of ma­sitinib hit the pri­ma­ry end­point for ALS. The com­pa­ny, though, has some cred­i­bil­i­ty is­sues af­ter the EMA re­ject­ed a pair of can­cer ap­pli­ca­tions for the same drug, cit­ing prob­lems with the tri­als used to gath­er da­ta.

It’s official. Memorial Sloan Kettering has picked a brain cancer expert as its new physician-in-chief and CMO, replacing José Baselga, who left under a cloud after being singled out by The New York Times and ProPublica for failing to properly air his lucrative industry ties.

His replacement, who now will be in charge of MSK’s cutting-edge research work as well as the cancer care delivered by hundreds of practitioners, is Lisa M. DeAngelis. DeAngelis had been chair of the neurology department and co-founder of MSK’s brain tumor center and was moved in to the acting CMO role in the wake of Baselga’s departure.

More than two years ago Ritter Pharmaceuticals managed to find enough silver lining in its Phase IIb/III study — after missing the top-line mark — to propel its lactose intolerance toward a confirmatory trial. But as it turned out, the enthusiasm only set the biotech and its investors up to be sorely disappointed.

This time around there’s little left to salvage. Not only did RP-G28 fail to beat placebo in reducing lactose intolerance symptoms, patients in the treatment group actually averaged a smaller improvement. On a composite score measuring symptoms like abdominal pain, cramping, bloating and gas, patients given the drug had a mean reduction of 3.159 while the placebo cohort saw a 3.420 drop on average (one-sided p-value = 0.0106).

An early-stage update on Adverum Biotechnologies’ intravitreal gene therapy has triggered investor concern, after patients with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) saw their vision deteriorate, despite signs that the treatment is improving retinal anatomy.

Adverum, on Wednesday, unveiled 24-week data from the OPTIC trial of its experimental therapy, ADVM-022, in six patients who have been administered with one dose of the therapy. On average, patients in the trial had severe disease with an average of 6.2 anti-VEGF injections in the eight months prior to screening and an average annualized injection frequency of 9.3 injections.

Too often, Alex Arfaei arrived too late. 

An analyst at BMO Capital Markets, he’d meet with biotech or pharmaceutical heads for their IPO or secondary funding and his brain, trained on a biology degree and six years at Merck and Endo, would spring with questions: Why this biomarker? Why this design? Why not this endpoint? Not that he could do anything about it. These execs were coming for clinical money; their decisions had been made and finalized long ago.

In the first of what it hopes will be a couple of major regulatory milestones for its new drug, Ardelyx has bagged an FDA approval to market Ibsrela (tenapanor) for irritable bowel syndrome.

The drug’s first application will be for IBS with constipation (IBS-C), inhibiting sodium-hydrogen exchanger NHE3 in the GI tract in such a way as to increase bowel movements and decrease abdominal pain. This comes on the heels of two successful Phase III trials.