Re­search­ing, cloning and breed­ing gene-edit­ed pigs are core to eGe­n­e­sis’ au­da­cious mis­sion to grow or­gans that can be xeno­trans­plant­ed in­to hu­mans. But per­haps un­sur­pris­ing­ly, lit­tle of that ac­tu­al­ly hap­pens at its Cam­bridge, MA labs.

Rather, the biotech works with ex­ter­nal par­ties for that part of the R&D and man­u­fac­tur­ing work. As eGe­n­e­sis ap­proach­es a fi­nal ver­sion of the gene-edit­ed or­gans that it will test in an­i­mals, it’s ac­quir­ing one of those part­ners and in­te­grat­ing it as a sub­sidiary.

ICBiotec’s 15-per­son team will stay in the Mid­west. In ad­di­tion to the ex­ist­ing fa­cil­i­ties and equip­ment, eGe­n­e­sis al­so gains ac­cess to un­de­vel­oped land they can build on.

The way they work to­geth­er — with eGe­n­e­sis study­ing fi­brob­last cells in dish­es and turn­ing over gene-edit­ing pay­loads they de­vel­op in the lab to ICB for fur­ther test­ing — won’t change, said CEO Paul Sekhri; eGe­n­e­sis is mere­ly tran­si­tion­ing from the largest client of ICB to its own­er.

“They have a few oth­er cus­tomers that we’ll prob­a­bly en­sure that there’s a prop­er tran­si­tion, but to be hon­est with you I think we will need all of their ca­pa­bil­i­ties, which is one of the rea­sons why we did the trans­ac­tion in the first place,” he said.

De­spite pan­dem­ic-re­lat­ed re­stric­tions, eGe­n­e­sis is still on track to fi­nal­ize the recipe for ge­net­i­cal­ly en­gi­neer­ing the pigs from which they will har­vest or­gans to test in an­i­mal mod­els for safe­ty and ef­fi­ca­cy — be­gin­ning with the kid­ney. In the US alone, there are al­most 100,000 peo­ple on the kid­ney wait­ing list but on­ly around 14,000 trans­plants per­formed each year.

“The re­search nev­er stopped, it just was slowed down a bit be­cause you just lit­er­al­ly couldn’t have the same con­cen­tra­tion of peo­ple in the lab as we had in the past,” Sekhri said.

The slog to­ward the clin­ic will in­volve many more reg­u­la­tor hur­dles, some of which would be un­fa­mil­iar even to the FDA as it deals with the eth­i­cal and tech­ni­cal im­pli­ca­tions of this sci-fi wor­thy un­der­tak­ing. The chief re­quire­ment for a green light to the clin­ic, Sekhri has pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed, is con­sis­tent pre­clin­i­cal re­sults among non-hu­man pri­mates.

Mov­ing ICB ca­pa­bil­i­ties in-house adds band­width for this cru­cial ex­er­cise, he added. Hav­ing bagged $100 mil­lion last No­vem­ber, the deal “doesn’t sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­pact our cash run­way.”

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

It’s been precisely one year and one day since Neil Woodford froze his once-vaunted fund, and while a global pandemic has recently shielded him from the torrent of headlines, the fallout continues.

Today, the California-based patent licensing firm Acacia Research acquired the fund’s shares for 19 healthcare and biotech companies for $284 million.  Those companies include shares for public and private companies and count some of Woodford’s most prominent bio-bets, such as Theravance Biopharma, Oxford Nanopore and Mereo Biopharma, according to Sky News, which first reported the sale. It won’t include shares for BenevelontAI, the machine learning biotech once valued at $2 billion.

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

In 2011, GlaxoSmithKline’s Benlysta became the first biologic to win approval for lupus patients. Nine years on, the British drugmaker has unveiled detailed positive results from a study testing the drug in lupus patients with associated kidney disease — a post-marketing requirement from the initial FDA approval.

Lupus is a drug developer’s nightmare. In the last six decades, there has been just one FDA approval (Benlysta), with the field resembling a graveyard in recent years with a string of failures including UCB and Biogen’s late-stage flop, as well as defeats in Xencor and Sanofi’s programs. One of the main reasons the success has eluded researchers is because lupus, akin to cancer, is not just one disease — it really is a disease of many diseases, noted Al Roy, executive director of Lupus Clinical Investigators Network, an initiative of New York-based Lupus Research Alliance that claims it is the world’s leading private funder of lupus research, in an interview.