→ Uni­ver­si­ty of Basel, Switzer­land spin­out T3 Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals has raised 12 mil­lion CHF at the close of its sec­ond fi­nanc­ing round. Cur­rent in­vestors were joined by Boehringer In­gel­heim Ven­ture Fund and Ref­er­ence Cap­i­tal SA. The round will help pro­pel the can­cer-fo­cused com­pa­ny’s lead prod­uct, T3P-Y058-739, in­to clin­i­cal test­ing, which is ex­pect­ed to be­gin in the mid­dle of 2020.

In ad­di­tion, the com­pa­ny wel­comed aboard Claire Bar­ton as CMO af­ter hav­ing been with the com­pa­ny as a con­sul­tant for the past 18 months. Her pre­vi­ous stints in­clude roles at Glax­oW­ell­come, Lil­ly and Roche.

→ A few weeks af­ter mR­NA uni­corn Mod­er­na tout­ed ear­ly-stage hu­man da­ta, the com­pa­ny is team­ing up with Ul­rich von An­dri­an at Har­vard Med­ical School (HMS) in a mul­ti-year re­search col­lab­o­ra­tion to tack­le im­muno­log­i­cal dis­eases. In ad­di­tion to that $2.45 mil­lion, Mod­er­na will al­so pro­vide $1.2 mil­lion in fund­ing to HMS to es­tab­lish an ini­tia­tive called the Al­liance for RNA Ther­a­pies for the Mod­u­la­tion of the Im­mune Sys­tem (AR­TiMIS), which will make use of Mod­er­na’s mR­NA and nanopar­ti­cle de­liv­ery tech­nol­o­gy.

→ NICE has giv­en the fi­nal no for No­var­tis‘ mi­graine pre­ven­tion drug Aimovig — based on a lack of sig­nif­i­cant da­ta. The watch­dog was un­will­ing to re­tract its orig­i­nal de­ci­sion and said in a state­ment that the tri­als ex­clud­ed in­di­vid­u­als that had shown no ben­e­fit from pri­or treat­ments — the ones who would be in most need of the treat­ment and the “most clin­i­cal­ly im­por­tant sub­group.” In ad­di­tion, the agency said the long-term da­ta pro­vid­ed failed to show sus­tained ben­e­fit, on­ly in­clud­ed peo­ple with episod­ic mi­graines and did not spec­i­fy how many pre­vi­ous treat­ments they had failed be­fore tak­ing the drug. Fi­nal­ly, NICE point­ed out con­cerns that “for the chron­ic mi­graine sub­group, there as no di­rect com­par­i­son with the cur­rent stan­dard of treat­ment, bot­u­linum tox­in type A (Botox), so its su­pe­ri­or­i­ty is un­cer­tain.”

The firehose of biopharma news is gushing these days.

That’s why broader and deeper is the theme for 2021 at Endpoints. You can expect new coverage outside our core R&D focus, with deeper reporting in some key areas. When John Carroll and I launched Endpoints nearly five years ago, we were wading in waist-high waters. Now we’re a team of 25 full-time staffers (and growing) with plans to cover the flood of biopharma news, Endpoints-style.

Eli Lilly’s $1.04 billion takeover of Prevail Therapeutics is officially complete, the company announced Friday.

The sides had entered into the buyout agreement last month with Lilly focusing on Prevail’s pipeline of gene therapies, highlighting two AAV9 programs in Parkinson’s disease and frontotemporal dementia as potential winners. Lilly paid $22.50 per share, which amounted to an 82% premium over the previous day’s closing price and a 117% premium over Prevail’s 60-day average.

It’s time for a new FDA commissioner to come on board, a rite of passage for Joe Biden’s administration that should help seal the new president’s rep on seeking out the experts to lead the government over the next 4 years.

As of now, the competition for the top job appears to have narrowed down to 2 people: The longtime CDER chief Janet Woodcock and Joshua Sharfstein, the former principal deputy at the FDA under Peggy Hamburg. Both were appointed by Barack Obama.