Seat­tle-based Presage Bio­sciences, which ap­proach­es drug de­vel­op­ment through its mi­cro­dos­ing plat­form, has some new part­ner­ships and cash to come with them.

Presage closed a $13 mil­lion fi­nanc­ing round Tues­day, aim­ing to ex­pand its net­work of clin­i­cal tri­al sites and ad­vance de­vel­op­ment of its mi­cro­dos­ing in­jec­tion de­vices. They al­so closed part­ner­ship deals with Mer­ck and Mav­er­ick Ther­a­peu­tics.

The fi­nanc­ing in­clud­ed $7 mil­lion from new in­vestors, in­clud­ing the Lab­Corp Ven­ture Fund, Bris­tol My­ers Squibb, and In­Harv Part­ners. An ad­di­tion­al $6 mil­lion con­vert­ible note from Take­da Ven­tures will con­vert to eq­ui­ty.

Presage’s big idea cen­ters around what they call Phase 0 test­ing, which us­es mi­cro­dos­es of mul­ti­ple drugs and com­bos on pa­tients to gauge their phar­ma­co­dy­nam­ic ef­fects. Their tech al­lows re­searchers to pep­per a tu­mor with mul­ti­ple ther­a­pies while in use by pa­tients, pro­vid­ing a bet­ter snap­shot of rel­a­tive ac­tiv­i­ty.

Tues­day’s new re­search col­lab­o­ra­tions with Mer­ck and Mav­er­ick will uti­lize Presage’s plat­form to eval­u­ate new on­col­o­gy pro­grams in these Phase 0 tri­als, bring­ing their to­tal num­ber of part­ners to five.

Kem­Pharm AD­HD drug wins ap­proval in chil­dren 6 and up

Kem­Pharm scored a new ap­proval on Wednes­day, and it’s send­ing their stock soar­ing.

The Cel­e­bra­tion, FL-based biotech notched the FDA OK for Azs­tarys, a once-dai­ly treat­ment for AD­HD in chil­dren aged six and old­er. Azs­tarys, for­mer­ly dubbed KP415, con­sists of serdexmethylphenidate, Kem­Pharm’s pro­drug of the drug Fo­calin, co-for­mu­lat­ed with an im­me­di­ate-re­lease ver­sion of the prod­uct.

Shares of Kem­Pharm $KMPH sky­rock­et­ed as much as 90% in ear­ly Wednes­day trad­ing, set­tling in at around a 70% in­crease lat­er in the morn­ing. Azs­tarys will be com­mer­cial­ly avail­able as soon as the sec­ond half of this year, and that process will be led by a sub­sidiary of Gur­net Point Cap­i­tal.

The ap­proval will al­so trig­ger a mile­stone pay­ment from Gur­net Point Cap­i­tal to Kem­Pharm, which may to­tal up to $468 mil­lion.

AD­HD has been a lu­cra­tive mar­ket for drug­mak­ers, ac­count­ing for near­ly $18 bil­lion of rev­enue in 2019, Kem­Pharm said.

The pe­di­atric field has proven tough for com­peti­tors, though, with the FDA spurn­ing Su­per­nus’ pitch last No­vem­ber. Reg­u­la­tors cit­ed con­cerns about an in-house lab used to an­a­lyze their ex­per­i­men­tal drug.

In the insular world of biotech, a spectacular failure can sometimes stay on any executive’s record for a long time. But for David Meek, the man at the helm of FerGene’s recent implosion, two questionable exits made way for what could be an excellent rebound.

Meek, most recently FerGene’s CEO and a past head at Ipsen, has become CEO at Mirati Therapeutics, taking the reins from founding CEO Charles Baum, who will step over into the role of president and head of R&D, according to a release.

Biopharma’s resident antibody-drug conjugate expert Seagen has scored a clutch of oncology approvals in recent years, finding gold in what are known as “third-gen” ADCs. Now, another of their partnered conjugates is ready for prime time.

The FDA on Monday handed an accelerated approval to Seagen and Genmab’s Tivdak (tisotumab vedotin-tftv, or “TV”) in second-line patients with recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer who previously progressed after chemotherapy rather than PD-(L)1 systemic therapy, the companies said in a release.

Danish biotech Gubra announced a research collaboration and license agreement with Bayer to develop peptide therapeutics to treat cardiorenal diseases. The collaboration will utilize Gubra’s peptide drug discovery platform to identify potential candidates.

This is not the first time Gubra has partnered with a company on peptide therapeutics — they partnered with Boehringer Ingelheim back in 2017 to create peptide therapeutics to treat obesity.

For a first-time fund, Jeito Capital talks a lot about continuity.

Rafaèle Tordjman had spotlighted that concept ever since she started building the firm in 2018, promising to go the extra mile(s) with biotech entrepreneurs while pushing them to reach patients faster.

Coincidentally, the lack of continuity was one of the sore spots listed in a report about the European healthcare sector published that same year by the European Investment Bank — whose fund is one of the LPs, alongside the American pension fund Teacher Retirement System of Texas and Singapore’s Temasek, to help Jeito close its first fund at $630 million (€534 million). As previously reported, Sanofi had chimed in €50 million, marking its first investment in a French life sciences fund.

After a busy weekend at #ESMO21, which included a big readout for its KRAS drug adagrasib in colon cancer, Mirati Therapeutics is ready to keep the pressure on competitor Amgen with lung cancer data that will undergird an upcoming filing.

In topline results from a Phase II cohort of its KRYSTAL-1 study, adagrasib posted a response rate of 43% in second-line-or-later patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer containing a KRAS-G12C mutation, Mirati said Monday.