Jean-Jacques Ga­raud

When Jean-Jacques Ga­raud left the top role in re­search and ear­ly de­vel­op­ment at Roche to build and ad­vise ear­ly-stage biotechs in his na­tive Paris, one fledg­ling quick­ly drew close to his heart.

The start­up, In­otrem, was de­vel­op­ing an im­munother­a­py to treat sep­tic shock. Hav­ing trained as a crit­i­cal care physi­cian be­fore mov­ing to Scher­ing-Plough and then No­var­tis, Ga­raud was all too fa­mil­iar with the dearth of treat­ments for sep­sis, which is dead­ly even in de­vel­oped coun­tries, claim­ing more than a quar­ter-mil­lion deaths in the US each year.

To­geth­er with co-founders Sébastien Gi­bot and Marc De­rive (De­rive did his PhD at Gi­bot’s lab and is now In­otrem’s CSO), he swift­ly gath­ered €18 mil­lion from French VCs An­dera Part­ners and Sofinno­va Part­ners, as well as the trans­fer seed fund known as In­serm and Swiss play­er Bio­Med­In­vest. But for the next round of fund­ing, Ga­raud told Phar­ma Board­room ear­li­er this year, he’d be look­ing to bring in in­ter­na­tion­al in­vestors out­side of France and Eu­rope.

Marc De­rive

And bring in in­ter­na­tion­al in­vestors he did. Morn­ing­side Ven­tures, which traces its roots to Hong Kong, is lead­ing In­otrem’s €39 mil­lion Se­ries B. New York-based In­vus al­so joined the syn­di­cate.

“This fi­nanc­ing val­i­dates the po­ten­tial of our tech­nol­o­gy plat­form cen­tered on the TREM-1 path­way and of our lead drug can­di­date for sep­tic shock, nan­gi­botide, which will be en­ter­ing a large Phase IIb clin­i­cal tri­al lat­er this year,” Ga­raud said in a state­ment.

Char­ac­ter­ized by dan­ger­ous­ly low blood pres­sure, sep­tic shock is the most se­vere com­pli­ca­tion of sep­sis, which oc­curs when the body mounts an over­whelm­ing re­sponse to an in­fec­tion, lead­ing to or­gan fail­ures. While an­tibi­otics can help tamp down the in­fec­tion, nei­ther it nor sup­port­ive care ad­dress­es the un­der­ly­ing shock.

In­otrem’s hy­poth­e­sis is that by in­hibit­ing TREM-1 — a re­cep­tor ex­pressed on myeloid cells — its pep­tide drug can mod­u­late the im­mune at­tack with­out com­plete­ly stop­ping the in­flam­ma­to­ry re­sponse from clear­ing harm­ful bac­te­ria.

The field is not packed, but the biotech is not alone ei­ther. Berlin-based Adrenomed is tack­ling a tar­get called adrenomedullin, while Medicxi-backed UK start­up Crit­i­cal Pres­sure reck­ons hit­ting DDAH1 is the way to go.

With the new fund­ing, In­otrem plans to launch a glob­al Phase IIb tri­al to test that the­o­ry, re­cruit­ing 450 pa­tients and test­ing two dos­es of nan­gi­botide against stan­dard of care and place­bo.

Keep­ing his phar­ma con­nec­tions close, Ga­raud has al­so se­cured a part­ner­ship with Roche on a com­pan­ion di­ag­nos­tic tool based con­cen­tra­tion of TREM-1 in pa­tients.

In ad­di­tion to sep­tic shock, In­otrem is al­so de­vel­op­ing its TREM-1 drugs in car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases and chron­ic in­flam­ma­to­ry con­di­tions.

It’s official. Memorial Sloan Kettering has picked a brain cancer expert as its new physician-in-chief and CMO, replacing José Baselga, who left under a cloud after being singled out by The New York Times and ProPublica for failing to properly air his lucrative industry ties.

His replacement, who now will be in charge of MSK’s cutting-edge research work as well as the cancer care delivered by hundreds of practitioners, is Lisa M. DeAngelis. DeAngelis had been chair of the neurology department and co-founder of MSK’s brain tumor center and was moved in to the acting CMO role in the wake of Baselga’s departure.

More than two years ago Ritter Pharmaceuticals managed to find enough silver lining in its Phase IIb/III study — after missing the top-line mark — to propel its lactose intolerance toward a confirmatory trial. But as it turned out, the enthusiasm only set the biotech and its investors up to be sorely disappointed.

This time around there’s little left to salvage. Not only did RP-G28 fail to beat placebo in reducing lactose intolerance symptoms, patients in the treatment group actually averaged a smaller improvement. On a composite score measuring symptoms like abdominal pain, cramping, bloating and gas, patients given the drug had a mean reduction of 3.159 while the placebo cohort saw a 3.420 drop on average (one-sided p-value = 0.0106).

An early-stage update on Adverum Biotechnologies’ intravitreal gene therapy has triggered investor concern, after patients with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) saw their vision deteriorate, despite signs that the treatment is improving retinal anatomy.

Adverum, on Wednesday, unveiled 24-week data from the OPTIC trial of its experimental therapy, ADVM-022, in six patients who have been administered with one dose of the therapy. On average, patients in the trial had severe disease with an average of 6.2 anti-VEGF injections in the eight months prior to screening and an average annualized injection frequency of 9.3 injections.

Too often, Alex Arfaei arrived too late. 

An analyst at BMO Capital Markets, he’d meet with biotech or pharmaceutical heads for their IPO or secondary funding and his brain, trained on a biology degree and six years at Merck and Endo, would spring with questions: Why this biomarker? Why this design? Why not this endpoint? Not that he could do anything about it. These execs were coming for clinical money; their decisions had been made and finalized long ago.