Take­da Ven­tures and Or­biMed have helped pump $61 mil­lion in­to a New York biotech join­ing the rush to dra­mat­i­cal­ly ex­pand the CRISPR tool kit.

One cru­cial com­po­nent in the CRISPR gene edit­ing process is a nu­cle­ase that cuts the tar­get DNA once it’s led there by a guide RNA. Cas9 is the most well known and broad­ly used among them, al­though re­searchers have been com­ing up with a va­ri­ety of al­ter­na­tives. The one that Emen­do Bio­ther­a­peu­tics will be ad­vanc­ing with its new fund­ing is dubbed OM­NI.

Their class of “op­ti­mized” en­zymes, ac­cord­ing to Emen­do, opens a new lev­el of pre­ci­sion un­at­tain­able with old­er ap­proach­es.

“For ex­am­ple, to treat dom­i­nant in­di­ca­tions, one al­lele needs to be edit­ed while leav­ing the oth­er one in­tact. Cur­rent CRISPR nu­cle­as­es are not spe­cif­ic enough to do this,” the biotech wrote on its web­site. “Dom­i­nant in­di­ca­tions are the vast ma­jor­i­ty of ge­net­ic dis­eases, high­light­ing the need for a nov­el ap­proach.”

That plat­form tech has at­tract­ed Take­da to a part­ner­ship in which Emen­do will syn­the­size OM­NI nu­cle­as­es for two undis­closed tar­gets. In re­turn, the Japan­ese phar­ma gi­ant agreed to par­tic­i­pate in this new fi­nanc­ing along­side Or­biMed Ad­vi­sors, Or­biMed Is­rael Part­ners and AnGes.

Tokyo and Os­a­ka-based AnGes was re­spon­si­ble for $50 mil­lion of the raise, up­ping its stake in Emen­do to 32%, ac­cord­ing to a fil­ing last month.

“Mak­ing Emen­do an af­fil­i­at­ed com­pa­ny of AnGes will as­sist us in the de­vel­op­ment of bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals through genome edit­ing, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to fur­ther ex­pand our­de­vel­op­ment pipeline as the fourth pil­lar of our op­er­a­tions af­ter HGF gene ther­a­py,nu­cle­ic-acid med­i­cines, and DNA vac­cines,” AnGes wrote.

Emen­do, which has an R&D op­er­a­tion in Is­rael, is col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton and Seat­tle Chil­dren’s Hos­pi­tal on its lead pro­gram se­vere con­gen­i­tal neu­trope­nia. Oth­er pro­grams in pri­ma­ry im­mun­od­e­fi­cien­cy, bone mar­row fail­ure, in­her­it­ed eye dis­ease and can­cer are al­so at­tached to pres­ti­gious aca­d­e­m­ic part­ners.

So­cial im­age: Take­da

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”