Derived from Strategic Transactions, Informa’s premium source for tracking life sciences deal activity, the Venture Funding Deals column provides a comprehensive monthly review of emerging biopharmaceutical companies that have received venture funding. This month’s column covers deals announced August and September.

Sandoz has become the latest firm to sign a settlement agreement over biosimilar Humira with AbbVie, heralding imminent launch in Europe. In the US, it will hold off launching until September 2023.

In a busy week, Carrick Therapeutics has added to its oncology pipeline, as well as bringing in Celgene deal maker George Golumbeski.

October has been a very good month for Ionis. Following US approval of Tegredi, it has now signed a potentially lucrative deal with existing partner Roche for another antisense drug, this time to tackle advanced dry AMD.

With partner CCHN, Alvotech will help finance construction of a biologics facility in Changchun, China. Novartis will work with Cellular Biomedicine to produce Kymriah for China, and will gain access to its CAR-T platform.

The two firms hope improvement in the six-minute walk test might be accepted by the US FDA as registrational endpoint for reldesemtiv in spinal muscular atrophy. Blackstone acquires Clarus, while Merck licenses TriNKETs from Dragonfly.

Cure Pharmaceutical is launching Sleep Stripzzz melatonin supplement delivered in a fast-dissolving oral strip. The company has bigger visions of using the CureFilm delivery method in CBD products and eventually Rx drugs.

The pharma is paying $250m up front for worldwide rights to Arrowhead’s Phase I/II RNAi candidate. Arrowhead says letting J&J take the lead on HBV enables it to focus on other pipeline programs it can bring to market itself.

Both Janssen and Aduro gradually realized the Listeria technology platform was not delivering hoped-for results. Aduro will not continue the projects abandoned by Janssen, and will focus on its STING and APRIL programs going forward.