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 Junshi forms commercialization JV with Rxilient to market PD-1 in Southeast Asia. JV to commercialize Junshi’s anti-PD-1 drug, toripalimab, in nine Southeast Asian countries. Rxilient, a drug registration/commercialization company, will pay $5 million for a 40% stake in Excellmab, the new JV, and Junshi will contribute the rights for toripalimab in the countries.

2️⃣ EIP Pharma and Diffusion Pharmaceuticals announce a merger agreement to create a leading CNS-focused company treating neurodegenerative diseases. The combined company will pursue late-stage clinical development of oral neflamapimod for treating dementia with Lewy bodies.

3️⃣ Confo Therapeutics collaborates with Daiichi Sankyo to discover novel medicines for CNS diseases. Under the terms of the agreement, Confo will lead the discovery process deploying its GPCR platform to generate lead series of small molecule compounds. Daiichi Sankyo can acquire a worldwide exclusive license for the resulting compounds and advance them toward clinical development and commercialization.

4️⃣ Ablaze Pharma acquires China rights to targeted radiotherapy drug for liver cancer. Ablaze Pharma in-licensed China rights to a first-in-class novel peptide drug candidate aimed at treating liver cancer

5️⃣ Pharma partner Sartorius eyes gene therapy market with a $2.6B deal. The lab and biotech tools supplier is acquiring Polyplus, a French company that specializes in components essential to the viral vector backbones of gene therapies.

⏫ Pipeline and Approvals

1️⃣ Oncology: COLUMVI (Glofitamab for Injection) receives Health Canada authorization with conditions for adult patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.

2️⃣ Oncology: AstraZeneca’s Calquence (acalabrutinib), a next-generation, selective Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor, has been conditionally approved in China for the treatment of adult patients with mantle cell lymphoma (MCL).

3️⃣ Dermatology: Bristol Myers Squibb’s Sotyktu is a first-in-class plaque psoriasis oral therapy approved in the EU.

4️⃣ Addiction: FDA approves first over-the-counter Naloxone nasal spray. The nasal spray reverses opioid overdoses and public health officials hope that making it more widely available could save lives and reduce the high rates of drug fatalities.

5️⃣ Vaccine: Hipra’s Covid-19 booster gets the EMA nod and enters an uncertain landscape.

💰 Funding

1️⃣ With one of biotech's largest private rounds in a year, ArriVent enters Phase III. The proceeds will bankroll a global Phase III study of a drug already approved in China, help ArriVent in-license more molecules, and expand the 40-person workforce by another 10 to 20 employees this year, including a chief financial officer.

2️⃣ Salubris Biotherapeutics announces a $35mn financing to advance development activities and provides pipeline updates. The investment will be used to advance and accelerate lead candidate JK07, including the planned initiation of the first Phase 2 study in HFrEF, the continuation of the ongoing Phase 1b clinical trial in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), and the launch of the Company’s first neurology clinical trial with JK07.

3️⃣ Big Pharma-partnered clinical trial matchmaker Inato secures $20mn to improve platform. Funding to advance its matching platform between pharma companies and potential clinical trial sites.

4️⃣ Cauldron raises $7mn to expand precision fermentation platform using ‘smaller, smarter, cheaper' continuous process. Funding to scale a manufacturing platform enabling its partners to produce high-value ingredients via precision fermentation more efficiently in a continuous process.

5️⃣ ThirtyFiveBio emerges from stealth mode. ThirtyFiveBio has built a fully enabled drug discovery platform and is advancing multiple unique families of first-in-class small-molecule inhibitors of GPR35 through lead optimization activities.

📰 Interesting News

1️⃣ Top 10 pharma R&D budgets in 2022. Roche remains the top dog among the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Roche spent 14.05 billion Swiss francs on R&D in 2022, or roughly $15.15 billion. That’s about $550 million more than Johnson & Johnson, which retained its silver medal position after jumping ahead of Merck & Co. in 2020.

2️⃣ Top Biotech licensing deals of Q1 2023. Moderna and CytomX; Voyager Therapeutics and Neurocrine Biosciences; Kronos Bio and Genentech; Karuna Therapeutics and Goldfinch Bio are some of this quarter's biggest licensing deals ranging from the surprising and pivotal to the lucrative and consequential.

3️⃣ 11 diabetes tech startups you need to know. The diabetes technology space is always innovating. From continuous glucose monitoring to insulin pumps and the artificial pancreas, we’ve seen a lot. Newer offerings include digital health, software, coaching, and more.

4️⃣ 5 hearing loss biotech companies you should know about. Recently, there have been some positive advancements made in hearing loss research within the biotech industry, including stem cell therapy, and there are currently several companies working on treatments for hearing disorders. Sensorion, Fennec Pharmaceuticals, Sound Pharmaceuticals, Decibel Therapeutics, and Akouos are the 5 companies mentioned in this article.

5️⃣ A new form of omega-3 could prevent visual decline with Alzheimer's disease. For the first time, researchers have developed a form of the omega-3 fatty acid docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) that is capable of crossing into the eye's retina to ward off visual declines related to Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and other disorders.