Cel­gene-part­nered biotech In­hi­brx has had a busy 2019 so far. The La Jol­la, Cal­i­for­nia-based com­pa­ny kicked off an ear­ly-stage on­col­o­gy study, part­nered with blue­bird bio, signed a pact with Italy’s Chiesi Group and se­cured a $40 mil­lion ven­ture cap­i­tal in­jec­tion. On Mon­day, it laid the ground­work for a rough­ly $75 mil­lion IPO.

In­hi­brx is de­vel­op­ing a pletho­ra of bi­o­log­ics — it has three on­col­o­gy pro­grams in hu­man clin­i­cal tri­als, a rare dis­ease pro­gram, for which it ex­pects to ini­ti­ate a hu­man study in the third quar­ter of 2019, as well as two pre­clin­i­cal drugs.

Its lead ex­per­i­men­tal drug tar­gets death re­cep­tor 5, or DR5, and is de­signed to treat mul­ti­ple tu­mor types, in­clud­ing dif­fi­cult-to-treat gas­troin­testi­nal tu­mors and mesothe­lioma both as a monother­a­py and in com­bi­na­tion with chemother­a­py. It is cur­rent­ly be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed in an ear­ly stage tri­al in pa­tients with sol­id tu­mors in­clud­ing sar­co­mas, and the read­out of that study is ex­pect­ed in the sec­ond half of this year.

Glob­al rights to In­hi­brx’s drug, IN­BRX-103, tar­get­ing CD47 — which pro­tects tu­mor cells from be­ing en­gulfed by macrophages — have been li­censed to Cel­gene $CELG. Mean­while, it has en­tered in­to an op­tion agree­ment with Chiesi for de­vel­op­ment and com­mer­cial­iza­tion rights out­side of North Amer­i­ca for IN­BRX-101 — which is be­ing de­vel­oped for the rare res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­ease Al­pha-1 an­tit­rypsin (AAT) de­fi­cien­cy.

Now, In­hi­brx is look­ing to list on the Nas­daq un­der the sym­bol “$IN­BX” and raise $74.75 mil­lion in the IPO. In a sep­a­rate pri­vate place­ment con­cur­rent with the of­fer­ing, Chiesi is buy­ing $10 mil­lion worth of In­hi­brx shares, ac­cord­ing to In­hi­brx’s fil­ing.

Last month, In­hi­brx raised $40 mil­lion from Viking Glob­al In­vestors — al­to­geth­er the com­pa­ny has so far raised $205 mil­lion since its in­cep­tion. Oth­er in­vestors in the biotech in­clude RA Cap­i­tal, Lil­ly Asia Ven­tures, Ar­row­Mark Part­ners, WuXi Bi­o­log­ics and Alexan­dria.

Im­age: Fer­gu­son Pape Bald­win Ar­chi­tects (FP­BA)

Celyad’s view on developing and delivering a CAR T-cell therapy with multi-tumor specificity combined with cell manufacturing success
Overview
Transitioning potential therapeutic assets from academia into the commercial environment is an exercise that is largely underappreciated by stakeholders, except for drug developers themselves. The promise of preclinical or early clinical results drives enthusiasm, but the pragmatic delivery of a therapy outside of small, local testing is most often a major challenge for drug developers especially, including among other things, the manufacturing challenges that surround the production of just-in-time and personalized autologous cell therapy products.

Amgen has signed up to be AbbVie’s neighbor in South San Francisco as it moves into a nine-story R&D facility in the booming biotech hub.

The arrangement gives Amgen 240,000 square feet of space on the Gateway of Pacific Campus, just a few minutes drive from its current digs at Oyster Point. The new hub will open in 2022 and house the big biotech’s Bay Area employees working on cardiometabolic, inflammation and oncology research.

Scripps and AbbVie go way back. Research conducted in the lab of Scripps scientist Richard Lerner led to the discovery of Humira. The antibody, approved by the FDA in 2002 and sold by AbbVie, went on to become the world’s bestselling treatment. In 2018, the drugmaker and the non-profit organization signed a pact focused on developing cancer treatments — and now, the scope of that partnership has broadened to encompass a range of diseases, including immunological and neurological conditions.

Three Samsung executives in Korea are going to jail.

The convictions came in what prosecutors had billed as “biggest crime of evidence destruction in the history of South Korea”: a case of alleged corporate intrigue that was thrown open when investigators found what was hidden beneath the floor of a Samsung BioLogics plant. Eight employees in total were found guilty of evidence tampering and the three executives were each sentenced to up to two years in prison.

Cellarity started with a simple — but far from easy — idea that Avak Kahvejian and his team were floating around at Flagship Pioneering: to digitally encode a cell.

As he and his senior associate Nick Plugis dug deeper into the concept, they found that most of the models others have developed take a bottom-up approach, where they assemble the molecules inside cells and the connections between them from scratch. What if they opt for a top-down approach, aided by single-cell transcriptomics and machine learning, to gauge the behavior of the entire cellular network?