Three years ago shares of NewLink Ge­net­ics trav­eled at a lofty al­ti­tude above $50 a share, with some high hopes rid­ing on IDO. Now those hopes have been thor­ough­ly quashed, along with the shares, with a minia­tur­ized mar­ket cap of $59 mil­lion and a stock price of $1.59. The com­pa­ny founder, Charles Link, left a cou­ple of months ago. 

And that makes it a fit ve­hi­cle for a re­verse merg­er.

Charles Link

That’s what Lu­mos Phar­ma thinks. This morn­ing the com­pa­ny said that they would merge in­to the pub­lic biotech, with a 50/50 share go­ing to in­vestors at each. When it’s over ear­ly next year, they’ll re­name the com­pa­ny Lu­mos and trade as $LU­MO.

The com­pa­ny plans to keep op­er­a­tions in Austin and Ames, Iowa, where NewLink has done its work. But it will fo­cus pri­mar­i­ly on LUM-201, which it hopes to make in­to “the world’s first oral ther­a­peu­tic for pe­di­atric growth hor­mone de­fi­cien­cy.” A Phase IIb is due to open up in the mid­dle of next year, with two oth­er in­di­ca­tions in the pipeline. And that’s it, for now.

Stine Seed Farm, the biggest in­vestor in NewLink, signed off on the deal, along with Lu­mos in­vestors: Deer­field Man­age­ment, a fund man­aged by Black­stone Life Sci­ences, Roche Ven­ture Fund, New En­ter­prise As­so­ci­ates (NEA), and San­té Ven­tures. 

The researcher behind base-editing is out with what some scientists are hailing as the biggest advancement in CRISPR technology since that 2016 breakthrough: “prime editing.” The new molecular gadget is capable of erasing any base pair and stenciling in another and cutting or adding long segments of DNA without breaking both strands of the helix.

David Liu, base editing pioneer and founder of Beam Therapeutics, published the findings in Nature alongside Andrew Anzalone. They estimated that the breakthrough “in principle” puts 89% of human diseases in purview — although experts cautioned that human therapies were a long way off.

For the past three years Frazier Healthcare Partners’ Bhaskar Chaudhuri has been carefully and quietly grooming Arcutis Therapeutics, a new dermatology play he co-founded to deliver topical formulations of well-known drugs. Now that the biotech is poised to enter Phase III, he’s being joined by a marquee syndicate for its $94.5 million Series C.

HBM Healthcare Investments, Vivo Capital, BlackRock, Omega Funds, Pivotal BioVentures, and Goldman Sachs jumped on board, joining Bain Capital Life Sciences, OrbiMed and RA Capital Management in backing Arcutis’ lead topical cream for plaque psoriasis.

The remedy for the most common side effect for one of the most common multiple sclerosis drugs is simple: aspirin.

Taking aspirin with Biogen’s Tecfidera will reduce the flush, a sometimes painful form of red skin irritation, many patients experiences. The problem is that the aspirin has to be taken at least 30 minutes before Tecfidera, turning a simple twice-a-day, one-dose oral drug into a staggered two-drug regimen.

Despite a head start, when Bristol-Myers Squibb and its pioneering checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo suffered a key lung cancer setback in 2016, they found themselves relegated to the backseat as Merck’s Keytruda seized the wheel on the road to immunotherapy stardom. Bristol-Myers has since suffered blow after blow in its quest to take a big slice of the lucrative market, peppered with some small successes. On Tuesday, the New Jersey drugmaker touted positive data from a Phase III open-label study in a bid to carve itself a piece of the frontline lung cancer market.