Checkpoint ends trial due to Russian invasion; Terns lines up more cash for NASH

2022-08-12

疫苗

You can count a Phase III program at Checkpoint Therapeutics as the latest collateral damage from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The biotech $CKPT reported this morning that it has had to scrap the late-stage CONTERNO trial combining cosibelimab with pemetrexed and platinum chemotherapy for non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer after the conflict slowed enrollment for the study. According to Checkpoint: — John Carroll Terns Pharmaceuticals is lining up $65 million to help fund clinical trials across cancer, obesity and the difficult-to-crack NASH. The offering, led by new investors Fairmount and Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, sent the biotech’s shares $TERN soaring nearly 25% after Friday’s opening bell. The offering is slated to close Tuesday. The Foster City, CA biotech reported earlier this week it had $140 million to keep the lights on into 2025, and with the added boost from the offering, Terns expects to have the cash needed to test a slate of drugs. A Phase I trial of TERN-701 for chronic myeloid leukemia kicked off in China in May, and the new cash haul will fund one or more trials in the US and/or Europe and get it into mid-stage testing. The proceeds will also get TERN-601 into a Phase II study in obesity and provide the money needed to complete the ongoing Phase IIa DUET trial in NASH. That study, testing TERN-501 alone and in combination with ex-Eli Lilly asset TERN-101 , will read out in the second half of next year. — Kyle LaHucik While there are more than a few companies working on vaccines, a new startup out of Mount Sinai is focusing its vaccine efforts on pandemic concerns. The famed hospital system launched the biotech, CastleVax, earlier this week in New York with a few key goals in mind, the first being commercially developing a Newcastle disease virus-based vaccine platform, originally developed in labs at Mount Sinai. Beyond that, the biotech has been working on multiple candidates ranging from preclinical all the way to Phase I and II, and the biotech’s lead candidate (NDV-HXP-S) is for Covid-19. Other viruses the biotech is working on include RSV, HMPV, hepatitis B and C, Lassa virus and Ebola. According to CastleVax, the biotech is looking at engineering NDV to express certain antigenic proteins native to infectious viruses, citing the spike protein in SARS-CoV-2 as an example. The NDV platform could do away with the specialized refrigeration that many current vaccines require, the biotech said. The goal is to research and develop vaccine against what Mount Sinai called “current and potential future pandemic threats,” on top of diseases with unmet need. CEO and president Matt Stober, a former Big Pharma vet who was also the former CEO at Istari Oncology, elaborated on development of the biotech’s Covid-19 candidate, which had already completed Phase I and II clinical trials. “We aim to engineer vaccines to fight a broad range of future respiratory pandemic threats that experts in the field foresee as inevitable,” Stober added. — Paul Schloesser

更多内容，请访问原始网站

文中所述内容并不反映新药情报库及其所属公司任何意见及观点，如有版权侵扰或错误之处，请及时联系我们，我们会在24小时内配合处理。

机构