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Good morning, everyone. Damian here with news of another biotech megaround, the potential next big thing from Novo Nordisk, and an anti-aging dispute involving dogs.
VC megarounds still happen
Alumis, a San Francisco biotech firm, has raised $259 million in venture capital to advance its oral anti-inflammatory, bucking some dismal trends in recent fundraising.
As STAT’s Allison DeAngelis reports, the company’s lead drug, ESK-001, targets a signaling protein called TYK2 to treat plaque psoriasis. Bristol Myers Squibb has an approved TYK-targeting medicine in the form of Sotyktu, and Takeda Pharmaceutical spent $4 billion to acquire one of its own.
The news comes amid a declining number of deals and dollars for private biotech firms, which have felt the squeeze of the industry’s recent contraction. On the one hand, if the market for biotech were better, a company like Alumis would have long since gone public. On the other, the fact that venture investors are willing to put hundreds of millions of dollars into any biotech company can only be a good thing for the sector.
Bayer’s not breaking up
Or at least not yet. The German pharma conglomerate, long under pressure to separate its drug and agricultural businesses, said yesterday that the answer to its financial problems is not a sweeping change to its structure.
On the question of breaking up Bayer, “our answer is ‘not now,’” CEO Bill Anderson said, “and this shouldn’t be misunderstood as ‘never.” Anderson, who is nearly one year into the job, has embarked on a restructuring that will shed hundreds of jobs and see the company cut its dividend by 95%, all in an effort to repair its finances after a disastrous 2018 merger with Monsanto.
Meanwhile, Bayer is still sitting on nearly $40 billion in debt tied to the Monsanto deal. The company is soon to lose patent protection for some of its top-selling medicines, and the continuing litigation over the weed killer Roundup is weighing on its future. It’s easy to see why many shareholders see a breakup — perhaps by selling the consumer business and spinning out the agricultural one — as an obvious path toward a cleaner balance sheet.
Novo has an oral GLP-1 combo, too
Amid all the discussion of potential usurpers to Wegovy’s place in the market for obesity treatments, Novo Nordisk is at work on an oral therapy that might best its own top-selling product. And the company is expected to finally get into details later this week.
The drug is amycretin, a daily treatment that boosts both GLP-1 and the related hormone amylin. In January, Novo said the drug had completed a Phase 1 trial but stopped short of disclosing data. That will probably change at the company’s annual investor day, slated for Thursday.
Analysts would like to see efficacy that compares to cagrisema, a Novo injectable aimed at the same two biological targets. Ideally, amycretin is so promising that Novo moves it straight into pivotal development, Barclays analyst Emily Field said in a note to investors. “Needing a broader Phase 2 program would likely be a disappointment, given high
Street expectations for this program,” she said.
The latest anti-aging spat involves dogs
David Sinclair, the renowned Harvard University longevity researcher, made waves among his colleagues this week with the claim that scientists had developed a medicine “proven to reverse aging” in dogs. The problem, Sinclair’s peers said, is that the maker of that medicine is a company he founded, and the evidence to support his claim doesn’t seem to be published anywhere.
As STAT’s Megan Molteni reports, the post sparked outrage from other scientists online, and the board of an international organization of top longevity researchers — which Sinclair happens to lead — will discuss the matter at its meeting this week.
It’s not the first time the anti-aging field has been roiled by some hyperbolic claims — and it’s not the first time that Sinclair has used his platform, with all the credibility a tenured Harvard professorship comes with, to promote science in which he has a financial stake. “In this particular case, it’s a bit more egregious,” said Matt Kaeberlein, a biogerontologist and former colleague of Sinclair’s. “I personally don’t think that there is any justifiable way that you can look at the claims that were made in that press release as anything more than false claims being used to mislead people into buying a product.”
More reads
- Republicans consider a new attack on Biden ‘march-in’ plan for lower drug prices, STAT
- Ozempic reduces severity of liver disease in people with HIV, study shows, Reuters