Never too late: Forbion pitches $100M SPAC; Kronos Bio releases early interim data on CDK9 inhibitor

Dutch VC For­bion is hop­ping on the ever-length­en­ing SPAC train.

To be led by Jasper Bos, who joined For­bion Growth as a gen­er­al part­ner back in May just af­ter the fund closed at $428 mil­lion, For­bion Eu­ro­pean Ac­qui­si­tion will tar­get late-stage op­por­tu­ni­ties in the life sci­ences in­dus­try in Eu­rope to merge with and bring on­to Nas­daq.

Cyril Less­er, se­nior con­troller at For­bion, will be the CFO while Bos serves as CEO.

Af­ter a record year for biotech SPACs, the craze for blank check com­pa­nies ap­pears to be in a bit of a lull re­cent­ly, al­though it’s clear­ly not stop­ping ex­pe­ri­enced in­vestors who think they will be able to spot a de­cent pri­vate com­pa­ny to flip pub­lic.

As is stan­dard with these types of deals, For­bion Eu­ro­pean Ac­qui­si­tion is pen­cil­ing in a $100 mil­lion raise by sell­ing shares at $10 apiece — a pitch cen­tered around the man­age­ment team’s ex­pe­ri­ence, net­work and ex­per­tise. It may raise an­oth­er $20 mil­lion ‘at the clos­ing of an ac­qui­si­tion,’ the com­pa­ny added. — Am­ber Tong

Kro­nos Bio re­leas­es ear­ly in­ter­im da­ta on CDK9 in­hibitor

On­col­o­gy biotech Kro­nos Bio an­nounced da­ta from its on­go­ing Phase I/II clin­i­cal tri­al of its oral CDK9 in­hibitor KB-0742, which is be­ing de­vel­oped to treat MYC-am­pli­fied sol­id tu­mors.

Among the 12 pa­tients treat­ed in the tri­al, KB-0742 had a ter­mi­nal half-life of 24 hours, with ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2 to 2.5-fold ac­cu­mu­la­tion be­tween days 1 and 10. Ac­cord­ing to Kro­nos, this long plas­ma half-life sup­ports the biotech’s ap­proach to defin­ing a ther­a­peu­tic win­dow for CDK9 in­hi­bi­tion.

Fur­ther dose es­ca­la­tion — the first part of the two-stage tri­al — is re­quired to reach de­sired lev­els of CDK9 in­hi­bi­tion.

The na­ture and sever­i­ty of the ad­verse events ob­served have been con­sis­tent with what is typ­i­cal­ly seen among heav­i­ly pre­treat­ed pa­tients with ad­vanced can­cer in Phase I tri­als, and Kro­nos Bio is con­tin­u­ing to en­roll in the tri­al.

‘These ear­ly da­ta are en­cour­ag­ing, and we look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing the tri­al and es­tab­lish­ing a rec­om­mend­ed Phase II dose,’ said Kro­nos Bio CEO and pres­i­dent Nor­bert Bischof­berg­er.

While the first stage is de­ter­min­ing safe­ty of the drug and find­ing a dosage lev­el for pa­tients, the sec­ond stage of the tri­al will en­roll pa­tients with MYC-am­pli­fied or over-ex­press­ing tu­mors, as well as oth­er tran­scrip­tion­al­ly ad­dict­ed tu­mor types, to as­sess the an­ti-tu­mor ac­tiv­i­ty of KB-0742 at the rec­om­mend­ed Phase II dose. — Paul Schloess­er

Gilead goes with Ama­zon Web Ser­vices as its cloud provider

Gilead had de­cid­ed on Ama­zon for its cloud ser­vices.

Gilead an­nounced this morn­ing that it is go­ing with Ama­zon Web Ser­vices as its cloud provider — cit­ing AWS’s on­line port­fo­lio for in­fra­struc­ture and oth­er ser­vices.

Ac­cord­ing to Gilead, AWS’ ca­pa­bil­i­ties in ma­chine learn­ing and an­a­lyt­ics fu­el de­ci­sion mak­ing across the phar­ma — from bio­mark­er dis­cov­ery to man­u­fac­tur­ing and clin­i­cal tri­al re­cruit­ment.

‘With AWS as our pre­ferred cloud provider, our re­searchers can use AWS’s port­fo­lio of ser­vices to gain the in­sights, agili­ty, and se­cu­ri­ty need­ed to de­liv­er new med­i­cines at speed,’ said Gilead SVP and CIO Marc Berson in a pre­pared state­ment.

In ad­di­tion, Gilead has moved more than 50% of its da­ta cen­ter foot­print to AWS over the past year through an ac­cel­er­at­ed cloud mi­gra­tion pro­gram with AWS Pro­fes­sion­al Ser­vices. The com­pa­ny al­so plans to mi­grate hun­dreds of ap­pli­ca­tions to AWS, which in­clude ap­pli­ca­tions that sup­port in­dus­try good prac­tice guide­lines and reg­u­la­tions in ar­eas like drug man­u­fac­tur­ing, stor­age and dis­tri­b­u­tion.

As a re­sult, Gilead will be ac­cel­er­at­ing its plans to up­grade its IT op­er­a­tions with AWS, while avoid­ing up­front costs to re­fresh hard­ware and the sus­tained costs of run­ning an ‘al­ways on,’ on-premis­es IT land­scape pro­vi­sioned for peak use. — Paul Schloess­er
https://endpts.com/never-too-late-forbion-pitches-100m-spac-kronos-bio-releases-early-interim-data-on-cdk9-inhibitor/