The Weekly Roundup newsletter curates the top five - deals, pipeline, funding, and news from the past week.

The complete list is available here: Industry Updates

🤝Deals and Collaborations

1️⃣ Croda acquires a South Korean biotech firm. Solus Biotech is a South Korean company specializing in ceramide and phospholipid technologies and with emerging capabilities in natural retinol.

2️⃣ Weight loss in a pill device firm Allurion heads to NYSE via SPAC merger. Allurion has commercialized a gastric balloon in the form of a capsule. Unlike traditional gastric balloons that are surgically implanted, Allurion’s device is meant to be swallowed by the patient under the guidance of a clinician.

3️⃣ Nona Biosciences enters into HCAb-based antibody discovery collaboration agreement with Mythic Therapeutics. Through the collaboration, Nona Biosciences will provide Mythic Therapeutics with access to its proprietary fully human heavy chain only antibody (HCAb) transgenic mice platform and antibody generation services to serve as input for Mythic Therapeutics' proprietary FateControl antibody engineering approach to generate next-generation ADCs for a wide range of cancers.

4️⃣ CANbridge acquires global rights to rare disease therapy from UMass. Beijing CANbridge Pharma exercised an option for global rights to a novel second-gen gene therapy aimed at spinal muscular atrophy.

5️⃣ A joint collaboration between Bio Immunitas and Genscript Probio leads to the development and fast-track manufacturing of a novel therapeutic platform. GenScript ProBio provides IND-enabling CMC service for Bio Immunitas to accelerate the preclinical development of 2 recombinant protein products using Bio Immunitas’ proprietary hRPP platform.

⏫ Pipeline and Approvals

1️⃣ Inflammation: Tavneos (avacopan) approved in Australia for the treatment of ANCA-associated vasculitis.

2️⃣ Neurology: Cassava Sciences announces patient enrollment update for Phase-3 studies of simufilam for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

3️⃣ Dermatology: LEO Pharma receives Health Canada approval for atopic dermatitis therapy.

4️⃣ Oncology: HLB’s Rivoceranib, Hengrui's Camrelizumab approved as combination therapy in China.

5️⃣ Nephrology: South Korea’s MFDS grants fast-track review designation to Everest Medicines’ Nefecon to treat primary IgA nephropathy.

💰 Funding

1️⃣ IgGenix sprints to the clinic with a peanut allergy candidate and an additional $40mn in funding. A majority of the Series B funds will be used to advance a self-administered injection for peanut allergies in clinical trials.

2️⃣ Evonetix closes a $24mn financing. The investment will enable the continued development of Evonetix’s semiconductor chips to commercial scale, and the extension of gene assembly capabilities for its binary assembly technology to deliver accurate, gene-length DNA in a benchtop instrument.

3️⃣ Alleviant Medical raises $75mn for no-implant heart failure treatment. Funding to support a global pivotal trial of its catheter-delivered interatrial shunt to treat heart failure.

4️⃣ Garuda grabs another $62mn for off-the-shelf stem cell therapies. The Series B funds will funnel into two programs slated to hit the clinic in 2024 transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia (TDBT) in Europe and bone marrow failure syndrome in Europe, South America, and North America in parallel.

5️⃣ Prokarium raises $30mn, and pushes new bacteria immunotherapy for bladder cancer to the clinic. The raise would go toward two projects: the bladder cancer program, as well as the second on RNA therapies delivered via the Salmonella platform.

📰 Interesting News

1️⃣ New Medtech to watch for in 2023: boosting health outcomes. List includes companies like Abbot, Axonics, BD, Boston Scientific, Edward Lifesciences, Intuitive surgical, and Zimmer Biomet.

2️⃣ The fungal crisis is here and desperately needs addressing. Mississippi has become the latest state to report residents infected with Candida auris, a highly contagious fungus that thrives in hospitals and nursing homes

3️⃣ Phthalate exposure may increase diabetes risk in women. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in plastics may contribute to diabetes risk in women, according to a new study.

4️⃣ What is BioGPT and what does it mean for healthcare? BioGPT is a type of generative language model, trained on millions of previously published biomedical research articles. This means BioGPT can perform tasks such as answering questions, extracting relevant data, and generating text relevant to biomedical literature.

5️⃣ How AI and ML can transform clinical research. Clinical trials are currently in an era of transformation through digitization, with much of the change being attributed to the integration of technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML).