Antibody suppresses HIV for four months

A new antibody has shown potential as treatment for HIV with a mid-stage trial showing it suppressed the virus for up to four months after patients stopped taking antiretroviral medicines. Developed by Taiwan’s United Bio Pharma and one of the US government-funded National Institutes of Health, the phase 2 study showed UB-421 was safe and did not induce production of antibody resistant HIV. The study was supported in part by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and results were published in The New England of Medicine. Conducted in Taiwan and led by United Bio Pharma’s chief scientific officer Chang Yi Wang, the study involved the 29 volunteers discontinuing their antiretroviral (ART) therapy at the time of their first infusion or a week later depending on their regimen. Fourteen study participants received weekly injections of UB-421 over eight weeks while 15 received a higher dose biweekly for 16 weeks. At the end of the eight- or 16-week treatment period, all volunteers restarted their previous ART regimen and were evaluated in follow-up visits up to eight weeks later. Apart from a single participant who discontinued the study because of a mild skin rash, volunteers in both groups-maintained HIV suppression (plasma HIV RNA levels under 20 copies/mL) throughout the treatment period in the absence of ART. Including previous phase 1 and phase 2 studies, a total of 78 patients received the UB-421 treatment.

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Iambic Therapeutics Announces Close of Oversubscribed $100 Million Series B Financing to Advance AI-Discovered Therapeutics into Clinical Development

Business Wire | October 10, 2023

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As part of the Series B, Iambic is delighted to welcome two new board members, Evan Rachlin, M.D., from Ascenta Capital and Kurt von Emster from Abingworth. “At Iambic, our world-class team has combined physics and AI to create a differentiated drug discovery platform that achieves a step-change in the speed and success rate for delivering best-in-class and first-in-class development candidates to clinic,” commented Tom Miller, Ph.D., Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Iambic. “With the Series B funding, we intend to advance multiple AI-discovered candidates into the clinic and expand our pipeline, demonstrating how the Iambic platform can deliver better therapeutics to patients in less time, with optimized target product profiles for greater likelihood of clinical success.” “We were struck by the originality of these molecules, offering distinctive approaches in both deeply validated and more novel biological pathways,” added Evan Rachlin, M.D., Co-founder and Managing Partner of Ascenta Capital. “Iambic’s platform enables a more creative and expansive exploration of how to treat diseases with profound unmet needs. We are delighted to partner with Tom and his extraordinary team in translating these thoroughly tested medicines into humans.” “Abingworth is proud to support the remarkably talented team at Iambic in its drive to revolutionize drug discovery and speed to the market with highly selective drugs,” said Kurt von Emster, Managing Partner and Head of Life Sciences at Abingworth. “AI-driven technologies, including methods that Iambic and NVIDIA researchers have built together, are charting a new path for researchers in the discovery of new therapeutic candidates,” said Rory Kelleher, Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA-accelerated computing and software are helping industry pioneers like Iambic drive scientific breakthroughs and our continued collaboration aims to speed innovation in drug discovery.” “We believe technology innovations powered by advanced computing and omics-derived data insights will transform drug discovery and pave the way for the next wave of groundbreaking medicines,” said Ron Mazumder, Ph.D., MBA, Partner of Illumina Ventures. “Iambic’s physics-informed machine learning approach has yielded promising lead candidates with superior profiles in record time.” Since its 2021 Series A financing, Iambic has rapidly built its AI-driven discovery platform, which unifies state-of-the-art, physics-informed machine learning and experimental automation, and has demonstrated the platform’s success in identifying therapeutic candidates with differentiated drug profiles. In addition to building out a deep bench of AI and drug-discovery experts, Iambic has discovered two candidates to advance into the clinic: IAM-H1, a highly selective and brain-penetrant inhibitor of HER2 and its oncogenic mutants, and IAM-C1, a potential first-in-class selective dual CDK2/4 inhibitor to address unmet needs in terms of therapeutic window and treatment resistance in cell-cycle-driven cancers. Further, Iambic has extended its leadership position in the AI community, creating methods such as NeuralPLexer and OrbNet to drive its discovery platform. With the funds raised in the Series B, Iambic intends to advance multiple candidates into clinical development, expand its pipeline with additional candidates with best-in-class and first-in-class potential, and continue to innovate and build next-generation AI and automation technologies for drug discovery. It plans to leverage NVIDIA technology such as the NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing platform and the NVIDIA BioNeMo cloud service to accelerate discovery. The company retains the technology created under its prior name of Entos Inc., adopting the new name of Iambic Therapeutics to reflect its transition to a company with the additional capability of clinical development of candidates identified through its AI-driven discovery platform. About the Iambic Therapeutics Physics-Informed AI-Driven Discovery Platform The Iambic Therapeutics AI-driven platform was created to address the most challenging design problems in drug discovery, incorporating the most current AI technologies and purpose-built tools from Iambic. The integration of physics principles into the platform’s AI architectures improves data efficiency and allows molecular models to venture widely across the space of possible chemical structures. The platform’s algorithms enable identification of new chemical mechanisms for engaging difficult-to-address biological targets, discovery of defined product profiles that optimize therapeutic window, and exploration of the chemical space to discover candidates for development with highly differentiated properties. Through close integration of AI-generated molecular designs with automated experimental execution, Iambic completes design-make-test cycles on a weekly cadence. About Iambic Therapeutics Founded in 2019 and headquartered in La Jolla, California, Iambic Therapeutics is disrupting the therapeutics landscape with its unique AI-driven drug-discovery platform. Iambic has assembled a world-class team that unites pioneering AI experts and experienced drug hunters with strong track records of success in delivering clinically validated therapeutics. 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PHARMACY MARKET

Halozyme Announces Positive Clinical Data of its High-Volume Auto-Injector Demonstrating Successful Rapid Subcutaneous Drug Delivery

PR Newswire | October 19, 2023

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PHARMA TECH

GoodRx and MedImpact Announce Program to Ensure Seamless Access to Affordable Prescriptions

Business Wire | September 14, 2023

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