Ole­ma On­col­o­gy will let go of a quar­ter of its work­force, as well as two top ex­ec­u­tives, as the biotech works to keep alive work on an ex­per­i­men­tal breast can­cer drug that has so far been a dis­ap­point­ment.

Kin­ney Horn

The cuts will af­fect work­ers in R&D and cor­po­rate func­tions, the com­pa­ny said in a press re­lease Thurs­day. Al­so out are CBO Kin­ney Horn and Cyrus Har­mon, a co-founder of the com­pa­ny and its chief re­search of­fi­cer. Har­mon will stay as a mem­ber of the board. The com­pa­ny had 83 full-time em­ploy­ees as of Jan. 31, ac­cord­ing to a fi­nan­cial fil­ing.

CEO Sean Bo­hen has led the com­pa­ny since he left the top med­ical spot at As­traZeneca. The job cuts will let the com­pa­ny fo­cus re­sources on OP-1250, the breast can­cer drug that has worked — and strug­gled with — to move for­ward for years.

Cyrus Har­mon

“Giv­en the chal­leng­ing eq­ui­ty mar­ket en­vi­ron­ment, we made some dif­fi­cult de­ci­sions re­gard­ing our or­ga­ni­za­tion and ear­li­er-stage pro­grams,” Bo­hen said in the press re­lease.

The com­pa­ny is worth a frac­tion of its val­ue from when it IPOed in 2020, and the shares were trad­ing around $50 a share. In No­vem­ber 2021, it an­nounced re­sults from its Phase I/II tri­al of OP-1250 that great­ly dis­ap­point­ed in­vestors be­cause of the low re­sponse rate in ad­vanced ER+/HER2- breast can­cer. The stock plunged and has nev­er re­cov­ered, and now trades around $4 a share.

The San Fran­cis­co-based biotech says it has enough cash to last in­to 2025. It re­port­ed $204.4 mil­lion in cash, equiv­a­lents and mar­ketable se­cu­ri­ties as of the end of last year and a net loss of $104.8 mil­lion.

It plans to start a Phase III tri­al of OP-1250, an es­tro­gen re­cep­tor an­tag­o­nist, in the sec­ond half of the year, as a sec­ond- and third-line treat­ment for metasta­t­ic breast can­cer. And it has Phase II tri­als that it ex­pects will re­port out this year, both as a monother­a­py and in com­bi­na­tion with Pfiz­er’s Ibrance.

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.