Amongst large pharma companies, Merck & Co Inc has kept its plans for responding to the coronavirus pandemic under the radar. This changed on 26 May, when the US company announced one acquisition and two collaborations aimed at developing both vaccines and a treatment for the disease.
Exscientia Ltd has raised $60 million in a Series C financing round led by Novo Holdings to expand its portfolio of drug candidates generated by the use of artificial intelligence. The company is a 2012 spin-out of the University of Dundee in the UK and is collaborating with several of the largest pharmaceutical companies to generate new small molecule drugs for a range of diseases.
Poxel SA has raised €17.7 million in a private share placement concurrent with the release of new preclinical data for one of its two clinical-stage compounds for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). The studies suggested a possible benefit for the compound as a combination therapy, as well an agent for treating other metabolic diseases.
Accure Therapeutics of Barcelona, Spain has been launched by investors in order to develop new therapies for diseases of the central nervous system (CNS). A Series A financing round amounting to €7.6 million was announced on 26 May, led by Alta Life Sciences and supported by the Centre for Technological and Industrial Development, an organ of the Spanish state.
France-based Tollys SAS has raised €2.3 million to advance the preclinical development of its lead cancer immunotherapy, bringing the total amount raised to €6.4 million since the company was founded in 2015. The Series A financing round followed the achievement of preclinical proof-of-concept for the candidate drug TL-532.
Within a month of joining forces with the University of Oxford to develop a candidate vaccine for COVID-19, AstraZeneca Plc has secured manufacturing capacity to produce one billion doses of the prospective treatment as well as financial support of up to $1 billion from an agency of the US government.
The anti-inflammatory drug Dupixent (dupilumab) has generated positive data in a pivotal trial of patients with eosinophilic esophagitis, a chronic, allergic inflammatory disease of the esophagus. Part A of the Phase 3 trial, which enrolled patients 12 years and older, demonstrated significant clinical and anatomic improvements, including the ability to swallow, the developers Sanofi SA and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc announced on 23 May.
Roche has expanded its diagnostic capabilities with the acquisition of Seattle, US-based Stratos Genomics Inc, an early-stage sequencing technology company. The deal was announced on 22 May but financial details were not disclosed.
Stratos has patented technology for converting DNA into polymers that are reportedly easy to read. In principle this makes it possible to sequence DNA at a higher speed and lower cost than existing methods. The technology is called sequencing by expansion (SBX) and will be used in a nanopore sequencer that is being developed by Roche.
Moderna Inc was set to raise gross proceeds of about $1.34 billion from a public share offering that was launched hours after the company reported positive interim data from a Phase 1 study of its messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine for COVID-19. The company is issuing 17.6 million shares at a price of $76 per share. The offering is expected to close on 21 May. Proceeds will be used to finance the cost of manufacturing its COVID-19 vaccine which still has to complete clinical development and be approved by a regulator.
Abivax SA is to receive €36 million in non-dilutive funding from Bpifrance, the investment bank of the French state, to conduct a Phase 2b/3 study of its anti-inflammatory drug ABX464 in high-risk patients with COVID-19. The randomised, double-blind and placebo-controlled trial will recruit 1,034 elderly or high-risk patients at sites in France and elsewhere in Europe.