MEDICAL
Invest Ontario | April 01, 2022
Invest Ontario is supporting OmniaBio Inc. in launching a new biomanufacturing facility that will catalyze Ontario life sciences jobs and innovation while advancing pioneering medicine with the potential to cure, not just treat, many forms of cancer, cardiovascular diseases, Parkinson's and diabetes.
OmniaBio, a Canadian cell and gene therapy contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), will be the anchor tenant in a new biomanufacturing campus being built in Hamilton's McMaster Innovation Park.
Subject to reaching a definitive agreement, Invest Ontario will provide a loan of up to $40 million, contributing to an overall project investment of over $580 million, creating 250 jobs by 2031. Invest Ontario will also be providing non-financial support to OmniaBio, including helping the company meet its future talent needs and promoting opportunities to enhance local skills development partnerships.
As a contract manufacturer, OmniaBio will support a broad range of cell and gene therapy companies – both homegrown and international – by providing process development and clinical/commercial production services in compliance with global health standards.
The OmniaBio investment supports Ontario's new Life Sciences Strategy that will advance the province's leadership as a North American life sciences hub offering a collaborative ecosystem for the development, commercialization and adoption of innovative health products and services.
OmniaBio is being spun out of the Toronto-based Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM), a leader in developing and commercializing regenerative medicine-based technologies and cell and gene therapies. OmniaBio will build on CCRM's existing global client base, with the project ultimately creating a six-fold increase in biomanufacturing capacity.
Ontario's life sciences sector is the largest in Canada (representing more than 50 per cent of related economic activity) and comprises about 1,900 firms employing around 66,000 people.
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RESEARCH
Indica Labs | May 13, 2022
Lunaphore, a Swiss life sciences company developing technology to enable spatial biology in every laboratory, and Indica Labs, a leading provider of computational pathology software and services, today announced a partnership to co-market an end-to-end solution that combines Lunaphore's flagship COMET™ spatial biology platform and Indica's HALO® and HALO AI™ digital pathology image analysis software.
Lunaphore's COMET™ platform provides superior multiplex staining and image acquisition capabilities facilitating the automated detection of up to 40 separate spatial markers per tissue slide without human intervention. In contrast to other spatial biology solutions, COMET™ works with off-the-shelf, label-free antibodies and is designed to provide researchers with flexibility for their workflow. COMET™ has a wide range of research applications across immuno-oncology, neuroscience, and infectious diseases.
Indica Labs' industry-leading HALO® and HALO AITM software enable fast, AI-based quantitative analysis of whole slide images. In combination with the COMET™ platform, the HALO Highplex FL module allows researchers to quantify an unlimited number of fluorescent markers and cell phenotypes defined by their biomarker expression. HALO Spatial Analysis and HALO AI deep learning classifiers are used in combination with Highplex FL to explore the distribution and spatial relationships between different cell phenotypes in the context of the tissue, such as tumor and immune cells. This additional spatial data is particularly important in immuno-oncology and neuroscience disease research.
We are excited to partner with Lunaphore to address the growing needs of our research customers for highly multiplexed assays, Combining Lunaphore's superior multiplexing technologies upstream with our powerful AI-based analysis downstream, together we provide a streamlined workflow for high dimensional imaging and image analysis."
Steven Hashagen, CEO of Indica Labs.
Our partnership with Indica Labs is another key aspect of our strategy to combine our COMET™ technology with industry-leading image analysis technologies, Indica Labs' solutions are used by a large set of researchers in the field, thanks to their ease of use and analysis capabilities. Combining Indica's solutions with the class-leading capabilities of COMET™ will help us pursue our shared goal of making tissue image analysis easier and more accessible to labs around the world."
Deborah Heintze, Chief Marketing Officer of Lunaphore.
About Lunaphore
Lunaphore Technologies S.A. is a Swiss company born in 2014 with the vision of enabling spatial biology in every laboratory. Lunaphore has developed a game-changing chip technology which can extract spatial proteomic and genomic data from tumors and transform any simple assay into multiplex spatial biology without complexity. Lunaphore empowers researchers to push the boundaries of research to ultimately develop the next generation personalized therapies.
About Indica Labs
Indica Labs is the world's leading provider of computational pathology software and image analysis services. Our flagship HALO® and HALO AI™ platform facilitates quantitative evaluation of digital pathology images. HALO Link™ facilitates research-focused image management and collaboration while HALO AP® enables collaborative clinical case review. Our Pharma Services team leverages all our image analysis platforms to partner with you to advance tissue-based research, clinical trials, and diagnostics.
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INDUSTRIAL IMPACT
SkylineDx | December 22, 2021
SkylineDx announced it received a capital investment from USA based investment and advisory firm Novalis LifeSciences, and one of Benelux' largest biotech investors Van Herk Investments, to further solidify its position in the USA dermatology diagnostics market. SkylineDx is at a critical growth stage in their development now that the first products are introduced to the USA market, and Novalis LifeSciences has demonstrated impressive successes with their strategic and operational advice to their portfolio companies. Marijn E. Dekkers, founder and chairman of Novalis LifeSciences, will be named board member of SkylineDx' Board of Directors. He brings a long track record of industry-related strategic leadership experience as the former CEO of Bayer AG, CEO of Thermo Fisher Scientific and his role in the recent 600M USD acquisition of Decipher Biosciences by Veracyte.
SkylineDx' dermatology program, often referred to as the Falcon R&D Program, currently overarches four dedicated dermatology initiatives, focused on prognostic and predictive biomarker development covering two skin cancers: melanoma and squamous cell carcinoma. These indications affect approximately 1.9 million patients annually in the United States only. One of these initiatives generated its first commercially available product, branded as Merlin Test, for which SkylineDx aims to accelerate the clinical adoption with this joint investment.
"It is a great honor to have Marijn and Novalis LifeSciences as our first specialized USA investor on board, with all their incredible experience and know-how. Together we aim to further extend SkylineDx' USA investor base and continue expanding our strong footprint there. Our mission is to improve a patient's quality of life by enabling them to benefit from personal insights at the genomic level of their disease. We are excited to be working with Marijn and his team to continue fulfilling this mission."
Dharminder Chahal, CEO SkylineDx
Marijn Dekkers comments: "I have monitored the progress of SkylineDx for several years now, and I am excited about the leading edge position the company has built in predictive biomarkers for melanoma and various other cancers. I very much look forward to working with the SkylineDx team to bring these sophisticated diagnostic tests to patients around the globe."
About SkylineDx
SkylineDx is a biotechnology company, focused on research & development of molecular diagnostics in oncology and inflammatory diseases. The company is headquartered in Rotterdam and complemented with a field medical and scientific affairs team in the USA and a CAP/CLIA certified laboratory in San Diego. SkylineDx uses its expertise to bridge the gap between academically discovered gene expression signatures and commercially available diagnostic products with high clinical utility, assisting healthcare professionals in accurately determining the type or status of disease or predict a patient's response to treatment. Based on test results, healthcare professionals can tailor the treatment approach to the individual patient.
About Novalis LifeSciences
Novalis LifeSciences LLC is a boutique investment and advisory firm that was founded in 2017 by Marijn E. Dekkers, and is based in Hampton, NH, USA. With a team of experienced operating executives from the Life Science industry, Novalis funds and advises visionary Life Science entrepreneurs. The firm has approximately USD 500M under management in two investment funds.
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MEDTECH
Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. | December 28, 2021
Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc. announced that initial testing of COVISTIX on recombinant N proteins demonstrated its ability to detect the Omicron variant, in addition to detecting the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and its other major VoCs such as the delta and delta-plus strains. The COVISTIX detection levels were similar for all variants. The ease of use and timely detection of Omicron infection was demonstrated by a recent case report of a Mexico patient infected with the Omicron variant detected first with COVISTIX in about 15-minutes test time. This result was confirmed a day later by RT-PCR and sequence verified a few days later to be Omicron infection.
In a laboratory setting, Sorrento has also studied the ability of COVISTIX to detect the Omicron variant compared to other Emergency Use Authorization approved, commercially available COVID-19 virus rapid antigen tests. Initial lab results demonstrate that COVISTIX was able to detect the Omicron N protein at a significantly lower level than other commercially available tests. With a difficulty to detect the Omicron N protein at low levels, some of the EUA-approved and marketed rapid tests may have a tough time detecting the Omicron infection at a reasonable sensitivity. False negative readings for infected asymptomatic patients could lead to a false sense of security and the inability to control outbreaks and achieve normal social and business routines.
Sorrento currently has the capacity to produce 30,000,000 COVISTIX tests a month and is currently building up its manufacturing capacity in the US. The company anticipates having a fully automated assembly line capable of producing 6,000,000 COVISTIX units per month up and running in Q1 2022. Pending US and global demand, this capacity could potentially be increased to over 100 million monthly in 2022.
About Sorrento Therapeutics, Inc.
Sorrento is a clinical and commercial stage biopharmaceutical company developing new therapies to treat cancer, pain, autoimmune disease and COVID-19. Sorrento's multimodal, multipronged approach to fighting cancer is made possible by its extensive immuno-oncology platforms, including key assets such as fully human antibodies, immuno-cellular therapies , antibody-drug conjugates, and oncolytic virus. Sorrento is also developing potential antiviral therapies and vaccines against coronaviruses, including Abivertinib, COVI-AMG™, COVISHIELD™, COVI-MSC™ and COVIDROPS™; and diagnostic test solutions, including COVITRACK™ and COVISTIX™.
Sorrento's commitment to life-enhancing therapies for patients is also demonstrated by our effort to advance a first-in-class non-opioid pain management small molecule, resiniferatoxin, and SP-102 corticosteroid for epidural injections to treat lumbosacral radicular pain, or sciatica, and to commercialize ZTlido® 1.8% for the treatment of post-herpetic neuralgia. RTX has completed a Phase 1B trial for intractable pain associated with cancer and a Phase 1B trial in osteoarthritis patients. SEMDEXA is in a pivotal Phase 3 trial for the treatment of lumbosacral radicular pain, or sciatica. ZTlido® was approved by the FDA on February 28, 2018.
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