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'Em­pa­thy and love were not shown’: The sto­ry be­hind Taysha’s lay­offs, one of dozens of biotechs suf­fer­ing this year’s bear mar­ket

A biotech launched by for­mer AveX­is lead­ers was on a mis­sion to treat mul­ti­ple rare dis­eases with new gene ther­a­pies. They speed­i­ly as­sem­bled a team and tout­ed their fast as­cent from seed to IPO, in a mere six-month win­dow in 2020, to re­peat the play­book they cre­at­ed with the FDA-ap­proved SMA drug Zol­gens­ma.

Flush with a pipeline of more than 25 pro­grams, Taysha Gene Ther­a­pies worked in con­cert with UT South­west­ern to take the uni­ver­si­ty’s gene ther­a­py re­search in­to the clin­ic with the am­bi­tion of treat­ing mono­genic dis­eases of the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem and pe­di­atric in­di­ca­tions. About half a dozen have made it in­to hu­man tri­als, with the lead pro­gram on track for reg­is­tra­tion path­way feed­back mid-year.

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