Raze Ther­a­peu­tics, the Cam­bridge start­up that launched in 2014 with $24 mil­lion in sup­port, is call­ing it quits.

The com­pa­ny was look­ing to ad­vance a new class of can­cer ther­a­peu­tics that tar­get key meta­bol­ic path­ways, but it ap­pears the sci­ence wasn’t quite ready for prime time.

Bruce Booth

Seed­ed in part by At­las Ven­ture, the com­pa­ny was fo­cused on can­cer an­a­bol­ic me­tab­o­lism, specif­i­cal­ly mi­to­chon­dr­i­al one-car­bon en­er­get­ics. The space has emerged re­cent­ly as a ma­jor dri­ver of can­cer pro­lif­er­a­tion, sur­vival, and bio­mass ac­cu­mu­la­tion. But ap­par­ent­ly the tech was too tough to con­tin­ue.

“Al­though it made in­trigu­ing progress, the un­der­ly­ing can­cer me­tab­o­lism bi­ol­o­gy was too com­pli­cat­ed to war­rant fur­ther in­vest­ment,” wrote Bruce Booth, part­ner at At­las, in a re­cent port­fo­lio up­date.

Such is life in biotech. Yet a new start­up has emerged in its place: Kyn Ther­a­peu­tics. Backed in part by At­las (and ex­plor­ing a sim­i­lar space), Kyn an­nounced a $49 mil­lion Se­ries A round this morn­ing. The com­pa­ny is led by a Raze’s for­mer CSO Mark Man­fre­di, an At­las en­tre­pre­neur-in-res­i­dence.

When asked what hap­pened at Raze, Man­fre­di said the com­pa­ny still had as­sets and col­lab­o­ra­tions, but no longer em­ployed any­one.

Pe­ter Bar­rett

The com­pa­ny was co-found­ed and led by At­las’ Pe­ter Bar­rett, and its sci­en­tif­ic founders in­clud­ed Vam­si Mootha (The Howard Hugh­es Med­ical In­sti­tute, Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal), Josh Ra­bi­nowitz (Prince­ton), and David Saba­ti­ni (White­head/MIT).

Ac­cord­ing to Booth, Raze’s sci­en­tif­ic as­sets went back in­to acad­e­mia for fur­ther ex­plo­ration.

By Natasha Cowan, Content Marketing Manager at Blue Latitude Health.
Many stakeholders are confused by novel precision medicines, including patients and healthcare professionals. So, how can industry help them to navigate this complexity?

Precision medicine represents a new paradigm in healthcare. It embodies the shift from treating many patients with the same therapy, to having the tools to identify the best treatment for every patient.

→ After Teva spinout 89bio recently announced that its IPO was being held up, the company is back in the game offering 5,304,687 shares at a price of $16 per share. The company has raised $84.9 million IPO in gross proceeds and will be listed under the ticker symbol $ETNB. BofA Securities, SVB Leerink and RBC Capital Markets are the joint book-running managers for the offering. Oppenheimer & Co is the co-manager for the offering.
→ Looking to amp up its presence in Japan’s hospitals, Novartis has struck a deal to buy out Aspen’s portfolio of generics in the world’s third largest healthcare market. The pharma giant is paying $440 million for Aspen’s Japanese subsidiary.
→ Novartis said tropifexor, a non-bile acid FXR agonist, has scored on several key biomarkers of NASH in a Phase IIb trial, including reductions in hepatic fat, alanine aminotransferase and body weight compared to a placebo at 12 weeks.

Its frontline and single-agent aspirations have been set back, but Bristol-Myers Squibb just took a big step forward in its efforts to apply its checkpoint inhibitor Opdivo to liver cancer. The FDA has granted breakthrough status and priority review to a combination, second-line treatment.

The designation is for Opdivo (nivolumab) in combination with Yervoy (ipilimumab),  for treating advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common form of liver cancer. The PD-L1 drug was already approved as a single-agent, second-line treatment for HCC. A PDUFA date was set for March 10, 2020 — just 4 months from now.

Lipocine’s latest attempt at securing approval for its oral testosterone drug has fizzled yet again.

The Utah-based drug developer on Monday said the FDA has spurned its marketing application, indicating that some efficacy data on the drug, Tlando, was not up to scratch to treat male hypogonadism, a condition characterized by low production of the hormone testosterone, which is responsible for maintaining muscle bulk, bone growth, and sexual function.

When RegenxBio disclosed that the FDA had placed a partial clinical hold on one of its lead gene therapies, execs outlined several customary next steps: continuing assessment and monitoring, delaying a related IND filing, and working with the FDA to address the matter.

As it turned out, they were planning something much less mundane. Two days after announcing the hold in its Q3 update, RegenxBio filed a lawsuit seeking to set it aside, the FDA Law Blog noted.

Roche is working on putting together a late-stage study for its monoclonal antibody Gazyva in patients with severe kidney disease associated with lupus after a combination approach helped patients in a mid-stage study.

The 125-patient NOBILITY trial evaluated Gazyva, combined with standard-of-care treatment mycophenolate mofetil or mycophenolic acid and corticosteroids, versus standard treatment alone. The combo met the main goal of inducing a statistically superior complete renal response (CRR) of 40% at week 76, versus 18% in patients given standard treatment, Roche said.