Looks like the region’s massive flooding didn’t get in the way of everything this week. We saw lots of headlines of partnerships for area drugmakers.
—Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, a Watertown, MA, developer of drugs designed to silence disease-related genes using RNA interference, announced its second big partnership this year, this time with the French biotech Ipsen. The deal won’t pull in a ton of cash for Dicerna, but will give the company 50-50 ownership rights to drugs developed through combining Dicerna’s RNAi technology with Ipsen’s strategy of using peptides as delivery vehicles in cells, Luke wrote. In January, Dicerna announced a partnership with Japan-based Kyowa Hakko Kirin for developing cancer drugs, which could be worth up to $1.4 billion in milestone payments.
—Ryan wrote about how the impending healthcare reform could mean big payoffs for Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ:[[ticker:NUAN]]), a speech recognition software company that’s advocating for the government to make rules that would standardize its technology alongside electronic medical records. Nuance has products that allow doctors to dictate patient information directly into electronic records systems and enables radiologists to more efficiently order imaging tests, helping to make healthcare customers the company’s biggest market.
—Avila Therepeutics announced it will receive as much as $3.2 million from The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society for the development of a drug that treats B-cell related cancers. The Waltham, MA-based company’s AVL-292 drug aims to form covalent bonds that hit targets on the B-cells in the immune system, and is set to enter its first clinical trial this year.
—Cambridge, MA-based Ascent Therapeutics announced it had changed its name to Anchor Therapeutics to better
