Advancing Drugs at Roche, Sophiris, Coherus, and Other Bio News

Offshore California sunset (photo by Bruce V. Bigelow)

Lou Gehrig’s disease. (The Hall of Fame baseball player’s nickname was “the Iron Horse.”) Iron Horse is the seventh life sciences startup that Avalon has founded through its GSK collaboration, which has worked so well that Avalon and GSK are extending their partnership agreement.

—Immune Design (NASDAQ: [[ticker:IMDZ]]) of Seattle and South San Francisco, CA, reported this week the kickoff of a Phase 2 trial for its cancer immunotherapy booster, CMB305. The drug is being tested in patients with soft tissue sarcoma in combination with Genentech’s atezolizumab, an anti-PDL1 checkpoint inhibitor.

—Promising Phase 3 results for the lead drug candidate from Portola Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PTLA]]) of South San Francisco were published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The drug is a reversal agent, given to patients who have received an anti-coagulant that causes major bleeding.

—Bad news continued to hit Palo Alto, CA-based Theranos, the high-profile startup looking to make blood tests widely available in storefronts. According to the Wall Street Journal, the supermarket chain Safeway signed on in 2011 to be the exclusive supermarket provider of Theranos tests but has backed away from the $350 million deal, and the two sides are looking to unwind the partnership.

—Cytokinetics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYTK]]) and its development partner Amgen (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMGN]]) said Sunday at an American Heart Association meeting that their experimental heart failure drug omecamtiv mecarbil demonstrated positive Phase 2 results, but they did not say whether they would move the drug into a larger Phase 3 trial, according to Reuters.

—San Diego-based Ignyta (NASDAQ: [[ticker:RXDX]]) said it has licensed the anti-cancer drug taladegib from Eli Lilly for $2 million and about 1.2 million shares of Ignyta’s common stock. Lilly also agreed to make a concurrent $30 million investment in Ignyta. Lilly retained certain rights to commercialize taladegib in combination with other Lilly compounds.

—San Diego’s aTyr Pharma (NASDAQ: [[ticker:LIFE]]) said it has selected a second investigational new drug candidate from its catalog of physiocrines, naturally occurring proteins that appear to restore stressed or diseased tissue to a healthier state. The company said the selected molecule is intended to help patients with severe pulmonary diseases with an immune and fibrotic component. aTyr has designated its lead drug candidate, Resolaris, for the treatment of rare myopathies with an immune component (RMICs), such as facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD).

—The New York Times Magazine ran a profile of University of California, Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna, a CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing pioneer.

—Google and the American Heart Association announced a $50 million grant, with each group contributing half, that will go to a single research team, as described by AHA CEO Nancy Brown in a blog post.

Xconomy National Biotech Editor Alex Lash contributed to this roundup.

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.