PHARMACY MARKET
Titan Pharmaceuticals, Inc. | December 22, 2021
Titan Pharmaceuticals, Inc. announced that it has commenced a process to explore and evaluate strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value. Titan has engaged Maxim Group LLC as its exclusive financial advisor to assist in this process.
Potential strategic alternatives that may be explored or evaluated as part of this process include an acquisition, merger, reverse merger, other business combination, sales of assets, licensing or other strategic transactions involving the Company. There can be no assurance that the exploration of strategic alternatives will result in any agreements or transactions, or that, if completed, any agreements or transactions will be successful or on attractive terms. Titan does not expect to disclose developments with respect to this process unless and until the evaluation of strategic alternatives has been completed or the board of directors has concluded that disclosure is appropriate or legally required.
About Titan Pharmaceuticals
Titan Pharmaceuticals, Inc. based in South San Francisco, CA, is a development stage company developing proprietary therapeutics with its ProNeura® long-term, continuous drug delivery technology. The ProNeura technology has the potential to be used in developing products for treating a number of chronic conditions, where maintaining consistent, around-the-clock blood levels of medication may benefit the patient and improve medical outcomes. Ultimate validation of the ProNeura® delivery system has been exemplified by approval of Probuphine in the US, EU and Canada.
Key ongoing ProNeura implant programs include IND-enabling, non-clinical assessment of TP-2021, a potent peptide kappa opioid agonist for the long-term treatment of severe, chronic pruritis, and nalmefene, a mu opioid receptor blocker designed to decrease relapse and potential death from overdose in detoxed patients with Opiate Use Disorder.
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BUSINESS INSIGHTS
TriMas | December 21, 2021
TriMasannounced that it has closed the acquisition of Omega Plastics (“Omega”), a manufacturer of custom components and tooling for medical, as well as industrial applications, adding to TriMas’ Packaging group.
Omega leverages its core injection molding capabilities, ISO Class 8 clean room and advanced in-house tool making capabilities, to provide its customers a faster product development cycle, from prototype development, testing and validation, to short and medium run production and assembly. Omega’s medical components are currently used in drug delivery, including consumable intravenous applications, as well as diagnostic testing and orthopedic applications.
As of September 30, 2021, TriMas’ Packaging group’s last twelve months sales were approximately $534 million, representing approximately 64% of TriMas’ total sales. TriMas plans to expand Omega’s production capacity, as required in order to benefit its customers’ longer-term needs, while also leveraging Omega’s advanced tool making capabilities to add to TriMas Packaging’s speed-to-market advantage on innovation and new product designs. Omega is expected to generate approximately $18 million in revenue in fiscal year 2021.
“We welcome Omega to TriMas’ family of businesses and look forward to working with the Omega leadership team to unleash future growth opportunities. I’d like to thank all the teams from Omega, TriMas and our respective advisors that supported the work to complete this transaction.”
Thomas Amato, TriMas President & CEO
The addition of Omega further expands TriMas Packaging’s Pharmaceutical & Nutraceutical product offering into supporting medical device contract development manufacturing customers.
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BUSINESS INSIGHTS
Iktos | December 20, 2021
Iktos, a company specialized in Artificial Intelligence for new drug design, and The Drug Discovery Unit (DDU), School of Life Sciences, The University of Dundee, focused on the discovery of therapeutics for neglected diseases and the translation of novel biology through small molecule drug discovery, announced entering a collaboration to apply Iktos’s generative modelling artificial intelligence (AI) technology in one of DDU’s drug discovery programs. Under the agreement, Iktos will apply its de novo ligand and structure-based generative modelling technologies, its AI-based retrosynthesis analysis and planning tool Spaya™, and know-how complementing DDU’s drug discovery capabilities to expedite the identification of potential pre-clinical candidates and to identify additional novel chemical matter with suitable properties.
The DDU was established in 2006 to respond to a lack of drug targets identified for neglected tropical diseases being translated into therapeutics for diseases impacting the poorest people in the world. The DDU translates basic science into lead compounds to validate putative drug targets, to use as tools to investigate disease pathways and, when appropriate, advance to pre-clinical drug candidates for multiple diseases, e.g. TB and cancer.
Iktos’s AI technology, based on deep generative models, helps to bring new insights and directions into the drug discovery process based on a comprehensive data-driven chemical structure generation technology. This technology automatically designs virtual novel molecules with all of the characteristics of a successful drug molecule. This approach, validated through Iktos’s other collaborations, is a novel solution to one of the key challenges in drug design: rapid identification of molecules that simultaneously satisfy multiple parameters, such as potency, selectivity, safety, and project-specific properties. This approach uniquely enables the exploration of chemical space and produces innovative molecule designs with greater freedom to operate.
Iktos has recently diversified its R&D efforts into the development of an AI technology for retrosynthesis. Identifying and selecting synthetic pathways is one of the most challenging and time-consuming tasks in synthetic and medicinal chemistry. Iktos has developed AI based retrosynthesis analysis and planning tool Spaya™ by harnessing the power of data-driven retrosynthesis algorithm for systematic exploration and prioritisation of synthetic routes for a desired compound in minutes.
“We are thrilled to be working with Iktos to drive our projects towards drug candidates. Iktos AI platform combined with our own in-house computational and medicinal chemistry design teams provide a powerful combination for innovative new drug design.”
Professor Paul Wyatt, Head of the DDU
“We are thrilled and proud to join forces with DDU with the aim to help in the discovery of therapeutics for neglected diseases and the translation of novel biology through small molecule drug discovery,” commented Yann Gaston-Mathé, President and CEO of Iktos. “Pleased to have earned DDU’s trust, we are confident that together with DDU and their established R&D partners, we will be able to identify promising novel chemical matter and solve complex multiparametric optimisation problems. The feedback from DDU’s research team will be highly valuable as we improve our product offerings. Our strategy has always been to tackle challenging problems alongside our collaborators where we can demonstrate value generation for new and on-going drug discovery projects.”
About DDU
The Drug Discovery Unit (DDU) (est. 2006) within the School of Life Sciences at The University of Dundee is a fully integrated, Biotech-style, drug discovery centre working across multiple disease areas. The DDU collaborates with partners to translate world-class biology research into novel drug targets and candidate drugs to address unmet medical need.
About Iktos
Incorporated in October 2016, Iktos is a French start-up company specialized in the development of artificial intelligence solutions applied to chemical research, more specifically medicinal chemistry and new drug design. Iktos is developing a proprietary and innovative solution based on deep learning generative models, which enables, using existing data, to design molecules that are optimized in silico to meet all the success criteria of a small molecule discovery project. The use of Iktos technology enables major productivity gains in upstream pharmaceutical R&D. Iktos offers its technology both as professional services and as a SaaS software platform, Makya™. Iktos is also developing Spaya™, a synthesis planning software based upon Iktos’s proprietary AI technology for retrosynthesis.
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