We didn’t bring you a life sciences roundup last Friday due to some time constraints, but some of the weeks’ headlines were too important to skip altogether. So here are two weeks worth of biotech profiles, partnership announcements, personnel moves, financing news, and more.
—The American Chemical Society awarded its highest honor, the Priestley Medal, to MIT bioengineering professor Bob Langer, in a rare move, as the award typically goes to chemists. The ACE cited Langer’s prolific laboratory and droves of patents, pending patents, and dozens of companies started as the reason he got the award.
—Cambridge, MA-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals paid $60 million upfront to license a couple of new hepatitis C drug candidates from South San Francisco-based Alios Biopharma that it hopes to make part of an entirely oral drug regimen for the disease. Vertex (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VRTX]]) could pay up to $715 million in development milestone payments over time, and potentially $750 million in sales milestones.
—Tal Medical launched to commercialize technology developed at Belmont, MA-based McLean Hospital that aims to treat depression using a specific type of magnetic field found in some MRI imaging machines. The company has about $800,000 in seed funding from PureTech Ventures and other investors, and an Eli Lilly veteran as its chief scientific officer.
—Former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer took a spot on the board of Verastem, a startup aiming to develop treatments against cancer stem cells.
—My colleague Luke caught up with Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]) CEO George Scangos in the biotech’s temporary office space in Kendall Square. Biogen is eyeing a move of its headquarters back into Cambridge to be closer to R&D operations there.
—Our New York editor Arlene wrote a profile on Constellation Pharmaceuticals, the Cambridge-based epigenetics startup that earlier this month announced it had raised another $15 million in its Series B venture financing—bringing
