It was a shorter week, but we had a heavy volume of headlines on acquisitions, partnerships, job cuts, and company strategies for New England-area biotech names.
—Cambridge’s Alnara Pharmaceuticals kicked off the holiday weekend last Friday with news that it been acquired by Indianapolis-based pharma giant Eli Lilly. The companies didn’t disclose the purchase price of the acquisition, which will give Lilly access to Alnara’s cystic fibrosis treatment, the enzyme supplement liprotamase, whose FDA approval Alnara has recently applied for. Ryan did a story this week looking at the process leading up to the buyout of Alnara, which included heavy reliance on contract employees and lean development budgets.
—Luke wrote about a transplant to New England’s biotech scene: AlloCure, a developer of adult stem cell therapy for kidney disease that has moved its headquarters from Salt Lake City to Burlington, MA. The startup has added a new CEO in the process, AMAG Pharmaceuticals and Amgen veteran Robert Brenner. Allocure is aiming to grow standardized stem cells that don’t need to be genetically matched with patients, which hospitals can keep in stock to treat patients with when they first notice the signs of kidney failure.
—Ryan profiled On-Q-ity, a Waltham, MA-based diagnostics company that’s out to track tumor cells in patients’ blood that evade traditional detection. The startup is led by the former president of Genzyme’s genetic testing unit, Mara Aspinall. On-Q-ity is developing biomarkers that can determine if cancer cells are resistant to certain therapies, helping to guide and monitor treatment courses for patients.
–Woburn, MA-based Bio2 Technologies, a developer of tissue engineering scaffolds for the orthopedic market, pulled in $1.1 million of an equity offering that could total $2 million, according to an SEC filing. The company has licensed a technology to improve a material’s porous properties, called “cross linked microstructure” from Woburn’s Geo2 Technologies, which is
