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We’ve reached the Wednesday of JPM Week, when gaits get sluggish, voices go hoarse, and early-morning conferences run an rising threat of cancelation. Persevere. And whilst you’re at it, don’t miss STAT’s multimedia protection of the convention, that includes decidedly energetic interviews, commentary, and on-the-ground reportage.
The consensus is that the darkish skies over biopharma are clearing
Perhaps it’s the abundance of daylight that crammed San Francisco this week. Extra possible, it’s the surge of offers that got here in December. However the sentiment round Union Sq. has been markedly extra optimistic this 12 months.
“I’m feeling numerous good power, actually,” mentioned Mira Chaurushiya, senior accomplice at VC Westlake Village BioPartners. “It’s not solely what occurred the previous few weeks of the 12 months, however what individuals are projecting shifting ahead.”
Now, it’s not all rosy skies forward. Biotechs are persevering with to put off employees and make painful strategic shifts to preserve money. However the worst could also be over. Through the course of this week, we ran into folks like Celsius Therapeutics CEO Tariq Kassum, who made the tough resolution final August to lay off 75% of his employees with a view to preserve the corporate afloat lengthy sufficient to run a medical trial for its first drug candidate. The early knowledge is in, and it appears to be like like Kassum made the precise transfer, he mentioned.
DNA sequencing doesn’t line up
Nvidia grabbed headlines by speaking about how synthetic intelligence would create an inflection level for drug growth. However one other expertise that was supposed to do this, DNA sequencing, didn’t achieve this effectively at this 12 months’s J.P. Morgan.
The brand new CEO of Illumina, Jacob Thaysen, mainly gave buyers what they need after the lengthy, shedding battle the corporate made to personal most cancers diagnostics agency Grail: a return to specializing in the core DNA sequencing enterprise and a promise to maneuver shortly on spinning off or promoting Grail, which the corporate purchased, disastrously, over regulators’ objections. Sadly, that was about as boring because it sounds: an organization that had at all times had a wholesome dose of wanting to vary the world sounded lots like a maker of, effectively, laboratory instruments.
Factor Biosciences, an upstart attempting to maneuver into the market, introduced that it had booked $25 million in gross sales in 2023 and launched new machines that may additionally sequence RNA and proteins. Oxford Nanopore — most likely at the moment essentially the most thrilling firm within the group for its capability to sequence DNA on thumb-drive-like machines and to get for much longer readouts of DNA code than the tiny bits of sequence different applied sciences should sew collectively — introduced earnings of £169 million, about £8 million lower than buyers anticipated. The corporate’s shares fell 14% on the London inventory change.
Roivant’s drug hunt
Roivant Sciences CEO Matt Gline has been spending his JPM Week assembly with buyers in an upper-floor lodge suite. The extra attention-grabbing motion is going down in one other lodge room flooring under, the place Roivant’s enterprise growth workforce, flush with $7 billion in money largely from the current Roche deal, is trying to find its subsequent drug asset.
In an interview with STAT, Gline mentioned Roivant’s licensing workforce has been assembly with pharma corporations about current medication of their pipelines which will now not match with spending or analysis priorities, however which in Roivant’s palms might be developed additional to create mutual worth.
Roivant shouldn’t be narrowing its search to any particular sort of drug or illness space, mentioned Gline, though it’s more likely to be one thing within the middle- to late-stage of growth. Most cancers and gene remedy are usually not in Roivant’s wheelhouse, and whereas Gline would love to seek out the subsequent nice oral GLP-1 for weight reduction, discovering a hidden gem like that isn’t possible, he mentioned.
“However that also leaves us with an entire bunch of potential medication to think about,” he mentioned. “The suitable factor for us to do is be affected person.”
Consider genome enhancing as ‘a molecular surgical process’
That’s the recommendation of Verve Therapeutics CEO Sekar Kathiresan, whose firm is at work on an audacious plot to maneuver genome enhancing from the world of uncommon illness and sort out the world’s commonest explanation for demise.
The plan is to make use of base enhancing, a successor to CRISPR, to silence a gene known as PCSK9, which encodes for a protein concerned within the physique’s clearance of dangerous ldl cholesterol. Shutting off PCSK9 ought to dramatically cut back ldl cholesterol, which in flip would cut back the danger of coronary heart assault. Verve’s multiyear plan to carry genome enhancing to the mainstream begins with treating a genetic type of excessive ldl cholesterol, adopted by research in additional widespread types of coronary heart illness, and, lastly, proving that its one-time therapy needs to be a broadly used preventive medication.
However how do you flip genome enhancing, a expertise related to small affected person populations and multimillion-dollar value tags, into one thing globally accessible?
“I’m not committing to something proper now, however you possibly can think about a world the place that is priced rather more like different one-time procedures in cardiovascular medication, like a bypass surgical procedure or a stent, different procedures which are everlasting and one time and supposed for lifelong profit,” Kathiresan mentioned. “That’s sort of how I see our drugs finally: Much less a drug and extra like a molecular surgical process.”
Learn extra.
Extra reads
- Cytokinetics deal rumors take merchants on white-knuckle trip, Bloomberg
- Spain’s Grifols to sue short-seller over important report, shares soar, Reuters
- Heated lawsuit between AdventHealth, MultiPlan attracts hospital lobbyists, STAT
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