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 After snagging the most expensive drug title, uniQure doles out $10mn upfront for ALS prospect. The deal gives uniQure global development and commercialization rights to APB-102, a gene therapy for superoxide dismutase 1 ALS, a rarer form of the degenerative disease.

2️⃣ HK inno.N eyes 2025 Korea opportunity with mAbxience denosumab deal. mAbxience has out-licensed marketing rights of denosumab candidate in Korea to local player HK inno.N, with a patent expiry opportunity in 2025.

3️⃣ Orbit Discovery and Endevica Bio enter multi-target collaboration to advance the development of cachexia therapeutics. The collaboration aims to accelerate Endevica’s development of advanced G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR)-targeting therapeutics on receptor sets both novel and complimentary to its lead compound.

4️⃣ Andelyn Biosciences, Odylia Therapeutics partner to manufacture gene therapy for vision loss. Following a review of the gene therapy manufacturing marketplace and impressed by Andelyn’s work within the rare disease space, Odylia recognized that Andelyn had the capabilities to manufacture this novel AAV capsid Anc80 and bring the treatment to clinical trials.

5️⃣ Purple Biotech signs an agreement to acquire Immunorizon. Immunorizon develops potential multi-specific T and NK cell engager oncology therapies.

⏫ Pipeline and Approvals

1️⃣ Inflammation: First medicine approved in the EU for eosinophilic esophagitis.

2️⃣ Covid: Valeo Pharma announces the company has filed new drug submission with Health Canada for sabizabulin.

3️⃣ Diagnostic: Nervtex AI device approved in China to diagnose Parkinson’s.

4️⃣ Hematology: FDA approves first oral treatment for anemia caused by chronic kidney disease for adults on dialysis.

5️⃣ Gastroenterology: Green light from MHRA for AbbVie’s Crohn’s disease therapy Rinvoq.

💰 Funding

1️⃣ Enzene Biosciences raises $50mn. The newly raised funds will be used to enhance manufacturing capabilities and drive expansion plans both in India and in the US.

2️⃣ Alto Neuroscience announces $60mn in additional financing. Funding to date will support Alto through a total of four Phase 2 readouts with four novel drug candidates across three indications, as well as the continued evolution of Alto’s Precision Psychiatry Platform

3️⃣ VitaDAO closes a $4.1mn funding round with Pfizer Ventures for longevity research. VitaDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) focused on raising funds for researching diseases of aging, cellular biology, and repairing age-related damage to the body.

4️⃣ Recurv Pharma receives funding for cancer therapy development. Recurv plans to develop a novel taxane therapy to treat solid tumors to the proof-of-concept stage.

5️⃣ OCD treatment startup NOCD raises $34mn. The company will use the new capital to pick up the pace of growth for its community-driven therapy model and its OCD-specialty therapist network.

📰 Interesting News

1️⃣ The next breakthrough in cancer treatment? NK cells kill cancer cells with the help of small “killer torpedoes,” or vesicles, that the NK cells secrete.

2️⃣ 13 biotech companies to discover in the Swiss Health Valley in 2023. The Health Valley covering the western part of Switzerland has plenty of biotech companies in and around Lake Geneva (also known as Lac Leman), in the cities of Geneva and Lausanne. There are also biotech companies further north, in Neuchatel, and around the Swiss capital, Bern.

3️⃣ New vaccine targets life-threatening fungal infections, a growing health concern. A new vaccine from the University of Georgia could be the first clinically approved immunization to protect against invasive fungal infections, a growing concern as antifungal drug resistance increases.

4️⃣ Contact lenses to treat dry eye syndrome. Engineers have developed a contact lens prototype that is specially designed to prevent contact lens-induced dry eye (CLIDE). The lens alleviates this condition by facilitating tear flow in response to normal eye blinking.

5️⃣ Three barriers that can slow AI’s potential in pharma. Our ability to access large datasets, rapid increases in computing power, and more precise algorithms are transforming end-to-end drug discovery. It will impact how we identify new targets and validate them, lead generation, patient identification, and how we design clinical trials and real-world data.