Days af­ter adding some fi­nance, deal­mak­ing and tech­ni­cal tal­ent to the top team, Escient Phar­ma has tak­en the wraps off a $120 mil­lion round to go broad­er in the clin­ic.

New En­ter­prise As­so­ci­ates, Abing­worth and Forge Life Sci­ence Part­ners co-led the Se­ries C. Escient did not re­turn a re­quest for com­ment.

The San Diego biotech has been turn­ing a new page. At the be­gin­ning of the year, co-founder Alain Baron stepped down from the CEO post, mak­ing room for Joshua Grass — who brought on a trio of new ex­ecs ear­li­er this month: Aaron Mishel, CFO; David Houck, VP of chem­istry, man­u­fac­tur­ing & con­trols; and Greg Bal­ani, di­rec­tor of busi­ness de­vel­op­ment.

As he an­nounced their ap­point­ments, Grass not­ed that Escient plans to start five more clin­i­cal tri­als in 2023.

Escient’s spe­cial­ty lies in what it calls neu­rosen­so­ry-in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­or­ders, or chron­ic dis­eases that re­sult from an ex­ces­sive re­sponse to ex­ter­nal stim­uli, with symp­toms rang­ing from itch to al­ler­gy to pain. By hit­ting a class of cell sur­face re­cep­tors known as Mas-re­lat­ed G-pro­tein cou­pled re­cep­tors, or MRG­PRs — which are ex­pressed on sen­so­ry neu­rons and im­mune cells — the com­pa­ny hopes to break the vi­cious cy­cle of neu­ro-im­mune over­re­ac­tion and in­flam­ma­tion.

Specif­i­cal­ly, the team is start­ing with two small mol­e­cule can­di­dates. EP262 is an MRG­PRX2 an­tag­o­nist that will be test­ed in chron­ic spon­ta­neous ur­ticaria, chron­ic in­ducible ur­ticaria and atopic der­mati­tis; EP547, an MRG­PRX4 an­tag­o­nist, has al­ready com­plet­ed a healthy vol­un­teers tri­al and is be­ing test­ed for ure­mic pru­ri­tus, thanks to its $77.5 mil­lion Se­ries B two years ago. Escient hopes to start an­oth­er proof-of-con­cept study in cholesta­t­ic pru­ri­tus.

In ad­di­tion to help­ing pa­tients re­duce the itch­ing sen­sa­tion, Grass not­ed that Escient is hop­ing its drugs can avoid “the se­ri­ous side ef­fects ob­served with oth­er ap­proach­es.”

Join­ing the syn­di­cate for this round are Avego, PFM Health Sci­ences and The Eleven Fund. Ex­ist­ing in­vestors in­clude The Col­umn Group, 5AM Ven­tures, Red­mile Group, Cowen Health­care In­vest­ments, Sanofi Ven­tures, Os­age Uni­ver­si­ty Part­ners, and Al­ti­tude Life Sci­ence Ven­tures.

New York City is investing $20 million in biotech this year in the form of a 50,000-square-foot “innovation space” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, complete with offices, research laboratories and events and programming space to grow biotech startups and companies.

Mayor Eric Adams said during his State of The City Address last Thursday that there will be an “emphasis” on making more opportunities for women and people of color to further diversify the industry. The City first reported the news.

Boehringer Ingelheim uncorked some positive results suggesting that Spevigo can help prevent flare-ups in patients with a severe form of psoriasis, months after the drug was approved to treat existing flares.

Spevigo, an IL-36R antibody also known as spesolimab, met its primary and a key secondary endpoint in the Phase IIb EFFISAYIL 2 trial in patients with generalized pustular psoriasis (GPP), Boehringer announced on Monday. While the company is keeping the hard numbers under wraps until later this year, it said in a news release that it anticipates sharing the results with regulators.

AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi won an appeals court win on Monday, as the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that the companies cannot be forced to provide 340B-discounted drugs purchased by hospitals from an unlimited number of community and specialty pharmacies.

“Legal duties do not spring from silence,” the decision says as the court makes clear that the federal government’s interpretation of the “supposed requirement” that the 340B program compels drugmakers to supply their discounted drugs to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies is not correct, noting:

A US appeals court has ruled against Johnson & Johnson’s use of bankruptcy to deal with mounting talc lawsuits, deciding that doing so would “create a legal blind spot.”

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a previous bankruptcy court decision on Monday, calling for the dismissal of a Chapter 11 filing by J&J’s subsidiary LTL Management.

Faced with more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging its talc-based products caused cancer, J&J spun its talc liabilities into a separate company called LTL Management back in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy, a controversial move colloquially referred to as a “Texas two-step” bankruptcy. Claimants argued that the strategy is a misuse of the US bankruptcy code — and on Monday, a panel of judges agreed.