Chris Perkin, Altasciences via Youtube
Altasciences CEO Chris Perkin has gone through several acquisitions in his 45-year career. And if there’s one thing he learned, it’s how not to go through an acquisition.
His company put that knowledge to use on Tuesday when it announced that it had acquired competitor Sinclair research, a preclinical contract research organization in Missouri. With the pickup, Altasciences gains 80 animal rooms, and full-service IND and NDA-enabling toxicology and safety pharmacology services.
The company has been around for more than 50 years, and Perkin said that the move has felt more like meeting up with fellow colleagues than acquiring a new asset. Sinclair’s regulatory history is solid, he said, and it gives Altasciences more opportunities in the small molecule market, which can be often overlooked. That will allow for a range of different drug classes, and broaden the overall preclinical offerings. ‘We’ve always been aware of Sinclair, I mean, that’s a competitor,’ Perkin said. ‘When it came up for sale…we started talking with the owners, and we connected along a lot of levels. Similar culture, similar approach to customer service. It just gave us so much of a comfort level that they had already heard of us, it was just more like colleagues coming together than forming a new company.’
Perkin said that culture was the biggest priority for the team. If you meet the current employees where they already are, you can identify strategies and methods the team have in place. When you don’t have to change much, morale is kept high.
The location in Missouri also stood out to Altasciences, as it already boasts Washington state and Pennsylvania sites on either coast.
‘It’s perfect because it fills a gap, but it’s only a couple of hours, at most from our campus with a clinical site, which always brings a lot of opportunities as we provide this integrated solution for drug development,’ Perkin said.
The acquisition marks the eighth site under the Altasciences umbrella. Six of those have come through acquisitions, and three of those deals were made in 2021 alone. The company isn’t done either. The deal fits into its long-term growth plan, which is focused on expanding both organically and through acquisitions, and stretching its reach geographically. Most pressing is the company’s move to Europe, which is currently in the works. More concrete news on that front is expected to be released in the next five to six months, Perkin said.
Their Staying Power Lies in their Patient-Centricity
Decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) were traditionally utilized in an isolated fashion prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. To continue their research within the constraints of the pandemic, sponsors and clinical investigators pivoted to a decentralized model out of necessity. At the onset, regulatory agencies offered some guidance on the digital approaches that are acceptable to ensure DCT approaches are applied in a way that maintains patient safety, as well as data quality and integrity.
Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, has become one of Silicon Valley’s biggest advocates for new forms of funding and conducting science (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED)
It’s big days for biology.
The pandemic has seen a series of very public scientific breakthroughs: mRNA vaccine, Covid antibodies, CRISPR as therapy. The minds behind these advancements have graced magazine covers and received prestigious awards.
But the last two years have also, far more quietly, seen a series of new experiments in how to fund the next generation of scientific breakthroughs.
Since March 2020, investors, academics, a significant number of Silicon Valley types, at least one Russian billionaire and two crypto billionaires and, most recently, a few West Coast universities have launched a series of grant programs, institutes, NGOs and companies hoping to change how life science research is done. Though unaffiliated and varying greatly in both size and form, they have broadly promised to evade bureaucracy and misaligned incentives and advance both basic and not-so-basic research in ways they say can’t be done in either conventional academia or profit-focused biotech.
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Eli Lilly is beefing up its fleet of vehicles being deployed to carry drugs to the brain.
Enlisting Canada’s Entos Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly has grabbed rights to a suite of proteo-lipid vehicles (PLVs) as part of a research collaboration that spans multiple programs focused on diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system. Entos will receive an upfront of $50 million, part of it as an equity investment, to start developing PLVs for Lilly’s selection.
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Robert Bradway, Amgen president and CEO (Getty)
Amgen is approaching the new year the same way it tackled 2021: swinging deals. But now it’s aiming to bring AI capabilities into the fold.
The big biopharma is partnering with Flagship’s Generate Biosciences on five therapeutic programs, the companies announced Thursday morning, in a collaboration that seeks to pair Generate’s machine learning algorithms with Amgen’s drug development capabilities. Amgen will pay $50 million upfront and up to $370 million in milestones for each program, which could total $1.9 billion when all is said and done.
For anyone who’s been following how the US government has been allocating and shipping supplies of its Covid-19 treatments over the past year, the news has shifted so many times that it can be difficult to keep track of what’s still being shipped and where.
More change is coming this week too, as HHS has now decided to re-start shipments of both Eli Lilly (bamlanivimab plus etesevimab) and Regeneron (casirivimab plus imdevimab) monoclonal antibody products after a short pause because neither product works against the new variant Omicron. Lilly’s combo also was halted last June due to the presence of other variants.
Kicking off 2022, hundreds of pharmaceuticals, including some blockbusters, saw their list prices rise by about 5% on average. But overall, net drug prices (cost after rebates) declined for the fourth year in a row, potentially complicating already stalled drug price reform efforts.
Among the drugs seeing new increases as of Jan. 1 are Gilead’s bevy of blockbuster HIV drugs.
Biktarvy, which pulled in more than $7 billion in worldwide sales in 2020, saw a 4.8% price increase in 2021, and now, another 5.6% increase in 2022, according to a new report from the nonprofit 46brooklyn Research.
Catalent CEO John Chiminski (Catalent)
If there was one defining theme at Catalent in recent years, it was expansion, as the CDMO upped its operations all over the world, from Baltimore to Japan. It did so under longtime CEO John Chiminski, who has led the Somerset, NJ-based company for 12 years, topped by 2 years of the pandemic. This year will be the last in the C-suite for Chiminski, however, as the company announced plans for a passing of the torch this summer.
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John Maraganore (Scott Eisen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On his way out of Alnylam, outgoing CEO John Maraganore, who had led the biotech through thick and thin for 19 years, said late last year he wanted to advise new biotech companies in the grandfather phase of his career.
‘It’s like a grandfather, right? You get the benefit of loving your grandchildren, but not having to take care of them all the time,’ Maraganore said at the time. ‘I want to be a granddad.’
Roger Perlmutter, Eikon CEO
Roger Perlmutter hasn’t wasted any time since announcing his supposed retirement from Merck in October 2020. After leaving his perch as one of the most successful R&D chiefs in Big Pharma, he’s now snatching a cool half-billion dollars to develop ‘a battery of innovative tools’ for drug discovery at the young startup Eikon Therapeutics.
Eikon closed on a $517.8 million Series B round on Thursday morning, bringing the Hayward, CA-based company’s total raise to more than $668 million.
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