Touching Base

Bristol Myers Squibb has selected Houston as the site for a new $2.3 billion multi-modal manufacturing campus designed to support drug product and finished goods manufacturing from late development through launch. Recursion, Roche, and its Genentech subsidiary have announced plans to co-develop a neuroscience discovery program based on the first validated target discovered th...

In the business news section of this week’s episode, Axiom Biosciences recently announced its plans to go public and made headlines for its plans to do so on the Hong Kong Exchange rather than a U.S. market. We dig into the company’s reasoning. Then we turn our attention to Latigo’s report of positive Phase IIb data for its non-opioid acute pain candidate, and its plans to go...

Promise hits Parkinson’s disease therapy, as a Phase I/II clinical study has demonstrated the feasibility of transplanting stem-cell-derived dopamine progenitor cells into the brain. In preclinical research, a new platform uses the brain’s fluid transport pathways to effectively deliver AAVs to therapeutic targets in mice. We’ll also cover the accelerating infrastructure mome...

More big biotech deals on the docket this week. First, Merck KGaA is buying Bio-Techne for $11.3 billion to expand its presence in high-growth life science markets. We dive into the details of this deal and then turn our attention to a $2.5 million collaboration to use artificial intelligence to find drug candidates for neuroimmune disorders. That deal involves Insilico Medic...

We are still talking about big pharma deals and biotech fundraising in this episode. The big news this week was Parabilis Medicines’s history-making IPO. We dive into the drug developer’s plans for the eye-popping $770.5 million that it raised. Next, we discuss the details of a collaboration between Merck and Protillion Biosciences to use artificial intelligence to discover m...