Start-Ups & SMEs

ARCH and Foresite incubated the company and recruited Genentech R&D veteran Marc Tessier-Lavigne to keep data generation, machine learning research and drug development under one roof.

UK-based Ochre Bio has signed its first major deal with Boehringer Ingelheim. Scrip talked to its co-founder and CEO, Jack O’Meara, about its human tissue-based drug discovery platform, its resulting RNA platform for liver disease and how the fledgling drug company's early work mirrored that seen in diagnostics.

Major Japanese companies Takeda, Astellas and SMBC are joining hands to establish a new joint venture with $3.9m capital and based in Japan’s largest biocluster Shonan iPark to help incubate local biopharma start-ups.

Corbus has presence in both antibody drug conjugates and obesity, and was the stand-out small-cap target for investors with a fivefold increase in its share price in Q1.

Private Company Edition: Regeneron launched a $500m venture fund and Canaan added $100m, bringing the venture firm’s recent total to $1bn-plus. Also, incubators plan to grow over the next decade and in recent financings Avenzo raised $150m and Nvelop launched with $100m.

The top 10 biggest share price winners and losers in Q1 from Evaluate show the investor frenzy for obesity drugs continues, while companies with governance doubts see shareholders retreat.

Clive Meanwell, former CEO of The Medicines Company, will helm the new company, backed by ARCH and other investors. He talked to Scrip about the new venture. 

Biopharma firms raised $6bn in the first quarter of 2024, the most of any quarter since Q2 2022. But without an increase in the number of companies raising funds, the rebound remains uneven.

Ali Mortazavi, CEO of e-therapeutics, says the RNAi specialist is delisting from AIM and describes the UK markets as “completely broken and closed” to biotech firms.

A year is a long time in biopharma. Pharmaprojects’ annual pipeline review finds changes in the therapeutic spread of drug candidates and a reordering of the top R&D companies, as Chinese firms made their presence felt all the more over the past 12 months.

Private Company Edition: Three consecutive $100m-plus venture capital rounds include Obsidian’s series C, a $132m series B round for Alterome and Diagonal’s $128m launch. Also, The Medicines Company’s Clive Meanwell reportedly is heading up a well-founded obesity start-up.

The company had pivoted towards a drug with the opposite mechanism to Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, but ran out of time and money.