Biotech Connection Los Angeles (BCLA)

FierceBiotech | February 07, 2020

After getting off a $66 million series B round in September last year, hereditary angioedema (HAE) specialist Pharvaris has taken on a seasoned HAE developer to help lead its pipeline. The startup has nabbed former Takeda/Shire exec Peng Lu, M.D., Ph.D., as its chief medical officer; Lu comes from Shire after it has been subsumed into Japanese Big Pharma Takeda and follows a whole host of other execs who have hit the exit amid the merger. At Shire, she led the team that finished up the phase 3 p...

BioSpace | March 12, 2020

Tyligand Bioscience, Ltd., a leader in small molecule drug discovery and development, and Context Therapeutics LLC, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on hormone driven cancers, today announced the signing of collaboration agreements for the development, manufacturing, registration and future commercialization of onapristone extended release (ER). Onapristone ER is currently being evaluated in patients with progesterone receptor positive (PR+) ovarian and endometrial cancers in t...

Sestina Bio | October 17, 2020

Sestina Bio, a new company creating a platform for automated synthetic biology, today announced that it has launched with seed funding from Foresite Capital, General Inception and OMX Ventures. The funds will be used to further the development of its digital cellular engineering and phenotyping platforms and support initial product development. The firm is the first company to launch from incubator Foresite Labs. Practitioners of synthetic biology aim to engineer novel living organisms -- usuall...

Yufan Biotechnologies | September 17, 2020

Exhaustion of T-cells is a key reason why CAR T-cell therapy may fail to control cancer. Recent work led by Xuebin Liao, PhD, Professor of Pharmaceutical Science at Tsinghua University (Si et al., Cancer Cell 2020) shows that HPK1 (hematopoietic progenitor kinase 1) promotes T cell exhaustion via NFkB-Blimp1 activation and that blocking HPK1, either by gene knockout or by small-molecule inhibitors, is an attractive strategy to improve CAR T-cell immunotherapy. These innovative approaches a...