Five months af­ter a huge Phase III fail­ure trig­gered mass lay­offs at the com­pa­ny, Toca­gen will sign it­self out of ex­is­tence.

Paul Wag­n­er

The biotech, once fo­cused on brain can­cer, an­nounced it has signed a re­verse merg­er agree­ment with Forte Bio­sciences, a biotech tack­ling atopic der­mati­tis and oth­er in­flam­ma­to­ry skin dis­eases. Toca­gen’s stock shot up 85% on the news, al­though that on­ly trans­lat­ed to a 41-cent bump for a com­pa­ny that saw the last of its val­ue go poof in Sep­tem­ber. The new com­pa­ny will trade un­der the tick­er $FBRX.

Just two years ago, Toca­gen went pub­lic and raised $85 mil­lion on the promise of a two-part ther­a­py for glioblas­toma. Part 1 used a vec­tor to at­tack can­cer cells and de­liv­er the gene for an en­zyme and Part 2 was a pro­drug that con­verts in­to an an­ti-can­cer drug. It was an in­trigu­ing ap­proach to a dead­ly in­di­ca­tion that has evad­ed most pre­vi­ous at­tempts, but in Sep­tem­ber, in its biggest test, the two-part ther­a­py showed all but no signs of work­ing.

In fact, pa­tients on the con­trol arm lived a month longer on av­er­age than pa­tients on the drug arm, 12.2 vs 11.1. That com­put­ed to a haz­ard ra­tio of 1.06 and a p-val­ue of 0.62. The com­pa­ny’s stock dropped 81% on the an­nounce­ment, and a month lat­er they cut 65% of their work­force, leav­ing the San Diego-based biotech with just 30 em­ploy­ees.

There is lit­tle read­i­ly avail­able pub­lic in­for­ma­tion on Forte Bio­sciences – there is no ap­par­ent web­site – but they now have some high-pro­file back­ers. When the merg­er clos­es, an in­vestor syn­di­cate led by Al­ger, BVF Part­ners and Or­biMed will in­vest $14 mil­lion, the com­pa­ny said. They said that will bring their to­tal amount raised to $25 mil­lion. They were found­ed in 2017 and soon af­ter be­gan look­ing for an ini­tial $10.6 mil­lion fund­ing round, ac­cord­ing to an SEC doc­u­ment, and are led by Paul Wag­n­er, the for­mer chief busi­ness of­fi­cer at CAN­bridge Life Sci­ences.

The com­pa­ny said their lead as­set is FB-401, a top­i­cal drug for an in­flam­ma­to­ry skin dis­ease that showed “sig­nif­i­cant ef­fi­ca­cy” in a Phase I/II tri­al, the re­sults of which will be sub­mit­ted to a peer-re­viewed jour­nal in mid-2020. A Phase II on atopic der­mati­tis pa­tients is sched­uled to be­gin in mid-2020, with a read­out in mid-2021.

Following a promise last year to go “big and fast in breast cancer,” Gilead has secured a win for Trodelvy in the most common form.

The drug was approved to treat HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer patients who’ve already received endocrine-based therapy and at least two other systemic therapies for metastatic cancer, Gilead announced on Friday.

Trodelvy won its first indication in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer back in 2020, and has since added urothelial cancer to the list. HR-positive HER2-negative breast cancer accounts for roughly 70% of new breast cancer cases worldwide per year, according to senior VP of oncology clinical development Bill Grossman, and many patients develop resistance to endocrine-based therapies or worsen on chemotherapy.

Sanofi expects its RSV antibody jointly developed with AstraZeneca will be available next season, executive VP of vaccines Thomas Triomphe announced on the company’s quarterly call.

Beyfortus, also known as nirsevimab, was approved in the EU back in November and is currently under FDA review with an expected decision coming in the third quarter of this year. The news comes as the FDA plans to hold advisory committee meetings over the next couple months to review RSV vaccines from Pfizer and GSK.

After a whopping $4 billion asset buy from Nimbus Therapeutics, along with a $400 million deal with Hutchmed for a colorectal cancer drug, Takeda executives touted pipeline optimism on its latest earnings call this week.

That’s because the TYK2 inhibitor for psoriasis Takeda is getting from Nimbus, along with the Hutchmed fruquintinib commercialization outside of China, are just two of what it reports are 10 late-stage development programs of promising candidates.