PHARMACY MARKET
Globenewswire | May 16, 2023
Athenex, Inc. a global biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery, development, and commercialization of novel therapies for the treatment of cancer and related conditions, today announced that, following an ongoing strategic review, it has reached agreement with its lenders to move forward with an expedited sales process of the Company’s assets across its primary businesses: Athenex Pharmaceutical Division (“APD”), Orascovery, and Cell Therapy.
To best facilitate this process, Athenex and certain of its subsidiaries filed voluntary proceedings under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas. This will enable the Company to divest its assets and wind down the Athenex platform in an orderly fashion, while seeking to maximize value for its stakeholders. The Company anticipates concluding the expedited sales process by July 1, 2023, with the Chapter 11 cases continuing thereafter to resolve claims.
Athenex has also reached an agreement with its secured lenders, subject to court approval, for the consensual use of cash collateral, which will enable the Company to, among other things, satisfy certain obligations to its vendors for authorized goods received and services rendered after the filing. Athenex Pharma Solutions (“APS”), which includes the Company’s manufacturing facility in Clarence, New York, is expected to continue its operations for at least the next 90 days, to provide commercial supply of tirbanibulin ointment. In addition, APD is continuing to operate in the ordinary course and fill customer orders with the ample inventory it has on hand.
Dr. Johnson Lau, Chief Executive Officer of Athenex, on behalf of the management team and the Athenex Board of Directors, said, “Throughout our history, we have sought to become a leader in bringing innovative cancer treatments to the market and improving patient health outcomes. Our team was successful in bringing tirbanibulin, through regulatory approvals, to the U.S. market and a number of EU countries, as well as Taiwan. Unfortunately, our oral paclitaxel product candidate received a complete response letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and this significant regulatory setback, coupled with challenging biotech markets and the difficult economic environment, put tremendous pressure on our ability to continue to fund our businesses.
“Over the past two years, we made considerable progress in refocusing our business around our promising NKT cell therapy platform, monetizing non-core assets to improve our balance sheet and extending our cash runway, paying down $108 million of debt, and undertaking a comprehensive review of strategic alternatives to create value for our stakeholders. While we explored every viable avenue to avoid this outcome, an orderly sales process represents the best path forward at this time.
“Our goal remains to identify purchasers who will continue development of the important drug candidates for which we have established a good foundation, and to bring them to market on behalf of medical practitioners and, most importantly, for patients. We are incredibly thankful to our team for their dedication to Athenex and will look to support our colleagues through this transition period.”
Pachulski Stang Ziehl & Jones LLP is acting as Athenex's legal counsel. MERU is serving as its financial advisor and Cassel Salpeter & Co., LLC as its investment banker.
About Athenex, Inc.
Founded in 2003, Athenex, Inc. is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to becoming a leader in the discovery, development, and commercialization of next-generation cell therapy products for the treatment of cancer. The Company’s mission is to become a leader in bringing innovative cancer treatments to the market and to improve patient health outcomes. In pursuit of this mission, Athenex leverages years of experience in research and development, clinical trials, regulatory standards, and manufacturing. The Company is focused on its innovative Cell Therapy platform, based on natural killer T (“NKT”) cells.
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PHARMACY MARKET
Businesswire | May 11, 2023
Simulations Plus, Inc. a leading provider of modeling and simulation software and services for pharmaceutical safety and efficacy, announced the release of a new integrated pulmonary software and services package. This targeted package will support pharmaceutical companies by streamlining their pulmonary drug development processes, enabling them to make better-informed decisions and bring therapies to market faster.
The pulmonary package offered by Simulations Plus is founded on the industry leading GastroPlus® modeling and simulation platform, which can be used to predict localized exposure in the lungs. That localized exposure data is then utilized to inform the ILDsym™ or IPFsym™ platforms for efficacy predictions. As client ventures launch and progress, Simulations Plus scientists will leverage their 40+ years of combined experience in pulmonary exposure and efficacy modeling to train in-house client experts on how to use the software and create models to accurately predict the exposure and efficacy of their pulmonary assets.
“Developing molecules intended to treat interstitial lung disease (ILD) and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a daunting challenge; they are serious conditions with no known cures,” explained Dr. Brett A. Howell, President of the DILIsym Services division at Simulations Plus. “We anticipate that the use of our targeted pulmonary package could lead to an acceleration in the development of treatments to slow or even halt progression of these diseases. By integrating the industry-leading platforms for PBPK/PCAT™, quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP), and the expertise of our scientists, along with the training of in-house scientists, we believe we can help our clients develop therapies that will improve and even extend the lives of patients worldwide.”
“Hiring and retaining skilled modelers is difficult, which is why many companies develop talent from within,” noted Vice President of Business Development Josh Fohey. “While we are always pleased to assist with our clients’ drug development programs as an extension of their team, we also want to empower them to engage with their models and data beyond what is typical with consulting relationships. As part of our Pulmonary Package, client teams benefit from a customized learning package using the tools in their program, implemented with support and guidance from our experts. Together, we can better understand lung absorption and efficacy, and find new treatments for respiratory disease.”
About Simulations Plus
Serving clients worldwide for more than 25 years, Simulations Plus is a leading provider in the biosimulation market providing software and consulting services supporting drug discovery, development, research, and regulatory submissions. We offer solutions that bridge artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning, physiologically based pharmacokinetics, quantitative systems pharmacology/toxicology, and population PK/PD modeling approaches. Our technology is licensed and applied by major pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and regulatory agencies worldwide.
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BUSINESS INSIGHTS, PHARMACY MARKET
businesswire | April 17, 2023
OM1, a leading real-world data, outcomes and technology company with a focus on chronic conditions, today launched PhenOM™, its artificial intelligence-powered platform for personalized medicine. Calibrated using OM1’s longitudinal health history datasets, PhenOM uses AI to identify unique digital phenotypes associated with conditions and outcomes and compare patients’ records to them to highlight risks and opportunities. PhenOM powers personalized healthcare insights at scale across the entire healthcare ecosystem, from life science research to point-of-care clinical decision making.
PhenOM is an AI that gathers detailed information from large patient datasets – including unstructured clinical notes and disease activity metrics – to isolate unique patterns associated with patients with distinct characteristics. PhenOM synthesizes these patterns into unique digital phenotypes or ‘fingerprints.’ These phenotypes can be studied to inform research and deployed in real-world datasets – inside and outside OM1 – as well as in health systems and through standalone patient-facing web portals.
Calibrated using OM1’s differentiated, high-quality data cloud – which is based on billions of data points from more than 300 million patients – PheonOM was built with expert clinician oversight. With an overarching mission to improve individual care and population health, the platform powers five solutions that address pain points across the healthcare system
Diagnostic Insights: Finding patients with rare, undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed conditions, including subgroups of interest
Treatment Insights: Personalizing treatment recommendations to improve access to care and individualizing treatment selection
Risk Insights: Predicting risk of specific negative outcomes, including disease progression, complications, and catastrophic events
Utilization Insights: Enabling focus on patients at risk for higher utilization, and utilization growth, over time
Clinical Trial Insights: Accelerating trial startup and recruitment by identifying patients most likely to meet qualifications for enrollment, including those potentially overlooked
Patient expectations over the last several years have shifted – from the adoption of virtual care and accessibility to the use of advanced technology to improve outcomes – but a persistent gap remains between population-level insights and individual patient experience: personalization. Recognizing this gap, OM1 developed PhenOM to translate patterns in large-scale data into meaningful outputs at the individual level and to better understand patient populations, diagnoses, progression, and treatment response.
“Most people have now heard of the promise of AI through GPT-4, but we still have not seen many really mature, real-world clinical applications using advanced language models,” said Dr. Joseph Zabinski, Managing Director of AI & Personalized Medicine at OM1. “PhenOM is groundbreaking technology because it uses AI to translate actionable insights from our highly enriched datasets and phenotyping technology into opportunities for more personalized healthcare. This capability creates a huge potential for impact for all stakeholders, from identifying patients with under-diagnosed conditions to enabling personalized assessments of benefit for particular therapies and accelerating clinical trial enrollment.”
About OM1
With specialization in chronic conditions, OM1 is re-imagining real-world data and evidence by developing large electronically connected networks of clinicians and health data in rheumatology, dermatology, gastroenterology, cardiometabolic, respiratory, mental health, central nervous system, and other specialty areas. Leveraging its extensive clinical networks and an unparalleled technology and artificial intelligence (AI) platform, OM1 offers industry leading enriched healthcare datasets, research analytics, data modeling, decision support, and retrospective and prospective clinical studies. With a focus on high-quality data and clinical outcomes, the offerings are used for accelerating research, demonstrating treatment effectiveness, supporting regulatory submissions, monitoring safety, and informing commercialization.
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