Aramis Biosciences CEO David Tierney
A new biotech emerged from stealth and joined the Massachusetts biotech scene this morning, announcing its launch with a Series A for $10.5 million.
Aramis Biosciences, founded back in 2018, had its financing round led by Cambridge-based investors Safar Partners, alongside a strategic investment from an unnamed ophthalmic pharmaceutical company.
Funds from the financing will be used to advance Aramis’s pipeline, which comprises essentially its lead product candidate A197, a topical immunomodulatory agent licensed from Italian biotech Dompé farmaceutici. Aramis is prepped to take it through Phase II proof-of-concept studies for dry eye disease.
And as part of the agreement between Aramis and Dompé, Aramis has global rights to the drug. Additionally, Aramis partnered with the Italian biotech to leverage Dompé’s R&D expertise and complete all IND-enabling preclinical studies and CMC development, as well as providing A197 for Phase II study.
Aramis CEO David Tierney said in a statement the biotech looks forward to entering Phase II studies with the drug, but didn’t give a timeline regarding when those trials would start.
Outside A197, the pipeline has only one other drug shown in preclinical studies, listing the target as only the generic ‘Other Immuno-Inflammatory Ocular Disease.’
Aramis has two scientific co-founders: Reza Dana and Sunil Chauhan, both professors and researchers at Harvard, where they studied how the role of a certain subset of pro-inflammatory T helper cells could be central to the immunopathogenesis of dry eye disease. Chauhan is on the five-member board of directors, and Dana is on Aramid’s scientific advisory board.
Outside of the co-founders, Aramis has three C-suite executives: CEO David Tierney (formerly of Pharma 2B, BioPharmX and EyePoint Pharmaceuticals), CBO David Lacey (also formerly of BioPharmX) and CMO Ken Mandell (former CMO at Neurotech and Noveome). Tierney and Lacey were at BioPharmX at the same time — Tierney was CEO from 2018 to 2020, and Lacey had worked up the ladder since 2013, becoming VP of corporate development in 2019 before also leaving in 2020.
Sensor-based technology for clinical trial data collection represents the latest medical paradigm shift. There are more than 700 clinical studies involving wearable devices currently underway in the United States. A study from Intel IT projects their inclusion in clinical trials will surge to 70% by 2025.
Apps, biosensors and patient-centered technologies increase visibility of comprehensive patient data. Pharma leaders anticipate the benefits of wearables to include better data (58%), faster results (33%) and lower trial costs (10%).
Robert Califf (Graeme Sloan/Sipa via AP Images)
As Rob Califf likely makes his return as FDA commissioner next month, his confirmation hearing yesterday offered a peek into some of the larger obstacles he’s going to face in the coming months and years.
The pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon with Omicron, and some vaccines and therapeutics may need to be tweaked or pulled from the market entirely as they prove to be ineffective against the new variant. The FDA, meanwhile, needs to get back on even footing with some longer-term direction.
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Crowd gathering at the Westin St. Francis for JPM in 2019 (Endpoints News)
Well, see you in January 2023.
In a surprise about-face, #JPM22 will now be fully virtual after organizers of the popular biotech conference decided to pull the plug on a live event in San Francisco given fears over the Omicron variant and a growing chorus of drugmakers opting out.
The move is no big surprise after reports swirled about some of the industry’s biggest players nixing plans to attend live and pressuring the bank to reconsider the annual meet at the Westin St. Francis. STAT reported Tuesday that Moderna and Amgen, among other large drugmakers, had already pulled out.
A nurse administers a COVID-19 booster shot to Joe Rigdon at a vaccination site in Eastmonte Park, Altamonte Springs. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
When Laura Burns went to get her first Covid-19 shot last January, no one had warned her that the vaccines might not work for her.
Burns, the recipient of a double-lung transplant in 2016, knew to be careful about the medicines she took. She consulted with her transplant team when the Pfizer and Moderna shots were authorized and only signed up after being told the vaccines would likely be safe for her, which they were.
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Jay Bradner, President, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
John Carroll: Well, hello everybody. This is John Carroll. I’m the editor of Endpoints News, the editor and founder of Endpoints News. I’m here with Jay Bradner, the president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. Jay, we’re going to be talking about ASH in just a second, but you’ve just recently celebrated your sixth anniversary as president of NIBR. And I’m curious, it’s such a significant amount of time for anybody to spend in one career phase. And looking back over the last six years, is everything fundamentally different about the research process and the translational arena that you’re in?
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Alex Nichols & Brian Fiske, Mythic Therapeutics co-founders
While most biotech startups begin with a light bulb moment or in-licensed technology, Mythic Therapeutics’ roots trace back to a dining room table and an empty notebook.
Alex Nichols and Brian Fiske shared an office at Flagship before they left a few years ago to create something independent. They wanted to identify a meaningful problem for patients and solve it. Several notebooks later, they landed on a mission: creating a safer, more effective antibody-drug conjugate.
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The US government is shifting its distribution of mAb infusions to fight the coronavirus, deciding to go from supplying tens of thousands of doses of GlaxoSmithKline and Vir’s mAb treatment sotrovimab in recent months to zero doses for the entire month of December.
That halt has led to speculation the government was prioritizing the distribution of Regeneron mAb combo of casirivimab and imdevimab and Eli Lilly’s combo of bamlanivimab and etesevimab because both companies have indicated that their infusions might not work as well against the Omicron variant (when compared to Delta).
Harpreet Singh, Immatics CEO (Credit: Allogeneic Cell Therapies Summit)
Just a few weeks after offering a positive readout on its first early clinical-stage offering, the transatlantic biotech Immatics is back with news that the research crowd around Rupert Vessey at Bristol Myers Squibb has anted up $150 million in cash to get on at the ground floor with one of their still-preclinical efforts.
This time the news is centered on IMA401, Immatics’ most advanced bispecific, which uses one binder to latch on to MAGEA4/8 while another is used to whip up T cell activity against tumor cells where that’s a common antigen. For now, that’s still a preclinical effort, with the first human trial set to launch in the first half of next year.
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Massachusetts biotech Keros Therapeutics now has a deal with Hansoh Healthtech, a Hansoh Pharmaceutical Group subsidiary, in the form of an exclusive license.
The deal was announced earlier this week, with Hansoh getting the license from Keros to develop, manufacture and commercialize KER-050 within China, Hong Kong and Macau.
KER-050, an engineered ligand trap and Keros’ lead drug candidate, is in Phase II trials for myelodysplastic syndrome and a bone marrow cancer known as myelofibrosis. The drug is designed to increase the production of platelets and red blood cells and treat low blood cell counts such as anemia, according to Keros.
https://endpts.com/a-new-eye-focused-biotech-is-out-of-stealth-with-plans-to-barrel-toward-phii-studies/
