Yesterday, Cambridge, MA-based Aileron Therapeutics announced that a collaboration it had formed with European drug giant Roche in 2010 has been expanded. The companies, which have been working together on two programs focused on turning Aileron’s “stapled peptide” technology into cancer treatments, have now added a third program focused on inflammatory diseases. The financial details weren’t disclosed, but the original agreement was already quite lucrative for Aileron: Roche vowed $25 million to the biotech over the first two years of the partnership. And Aileron is eligible for up to $1.1 billion in milestone payments—one of which it said yesterday it recently received.

Stapled peptides are fragments of proteins that are linked in a way that’s designed to stabilize them, so they don’t degrade too quickly in the body. And rather than attaching to targets on the surface of cells—like many drugs do—Aileron’s compounds are designed to penetrate cell’s outer membranes so they can more effectively hit disease targets.

Aileron CEO Joseph Yanchik believes Roche’s support will be vital to advancing the entire field of stapled peptides. “Until a year ago, all discussion about stapled peptides as a drug platform was coming out of the academic world and our presentations,” he says. “People wanted to see a large pharma company, with all its skepticism, believing it could have success with this technology. This is the first validation that stapled peptides are valuable.”

Aileron has taken a deliberately slow approach to proving out the idea of stapled peptides and finding the right partner to take it forward. The company was founded in 2005 on technology developed by a Harvard chemist and two biologists from Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The basic concept is to combine the best properties of conventional, small-molecule chemical drugs with large-molecule protein drugs in a way that eliminates the shortcomings of both. “Small molecules can’t occupy the whole surface of cells,” says Steven Kafka, Aileron’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer. “Large molecules can’t actually get inside of cells.” Plus most proteins unravel in the body and are chewed up by enzymes within minutes, rendering them useless as therapies.

So Aileron’s scientists have spent much of the last five years figuring out how to staple peptides—fragments of proteins—together so they’re not only resistant to degradation, but they’re also effective at penetrating cell membranes and binding to disease targets within those cells. “This is a difficult thing to do because you improve one property and end up losing another,” says Tomi Sawyer, Aileron’s chief scientific officer. “We’re able to break through that threshold to get both … Next Page »

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Xoma, the Berkeley, CA-based antibody drug developer that has been around for 30 years, said today that CEO Steve Engle has resigned, effective immediately. He will be replaced on an interim basis by John Varian, a member of the board.

Engle, who has been with the company four years, is also relinquishing his titles of president and chairman of the board, according to a company statement. Xoma didn’t provide any official reason in today’s statement for Engle’s departure, although Varian said the company now has “an opportunity to take a fresh look at our business, potentially finding additional ways to build value in the company and for our shareholders.”

Xoma has the dubious distinction of being one of the longest-surviving biotech drug developers to have never developed an FDA approved product—the New York Times once called it one of biotech’s “zombies.” The company has burned through more than $867 million of investor capital since its founding, according to its most recent quarterly report.

The developer of antibody drugs for cancer and inflammatory diseases has struck a number of partnerships with other companies over the years, and during Engle’s time, it sought to become more commercially oriented with a lead drug known as XOMA 052.

Shares of Xoma fell 4.9 percent today to close at $1.96 today, before the announcement.

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Watertown, MA-based Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, a developer of second-generation RNA-interference drugs, said today it is expanding its collaboration with the Japanese drug-maker Kyowa Hakko Kirin to include research of gene-silencing treatments for immunologic and inflammatory diseases. The firms announced their original collaboration, worth up to $1.4 billion, in January 2010 to focus on treatments for cancer. The expansion of this collaboration is a bit of good news for the RNAi therapeutics game, which took a big hit last month when the Swiss healthcare giant Roche announced its exit from research in the field.

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Logical Therapeutics, a developer of drugs for inflammatory conditions, says that it has closed a $16.9 million in a Series C round of funding, according to a press release. Xconomy reported last week that the Waltham, MA-based firm had raised $10 million of a planned $16.9 million round of financing, based on online records from the SEC. The company did not comment at the time, and it wasn’t clear from the records who invested in the financing. Now Logical says it’s closed on the full amount, and that SV Life Sciences led the round, which included investments from Burrill & Co., Novo A/S, and Novitas Capital.

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Dyax (NASDAQ: DYAX), a Cambridge, MA-based developer of a drug for an inflammatory disease, has raised $59.6 million in a stock deal. Last month the company raised $51.8 million through the sale of 17 million shares at $3.25 per share, and raised an additional $8 million when underwriter Jefferies & Company exercised its over-allotment option to purchase an additional 2.55 million shares of common stock at $3.25 per share, in a sale that closed today. The funding from the stock offering will go to Dyax’s Kalbitor (ecallantide), a drug for treating acute attacks of an inflammatory disease called hereditary angioedema.

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Epizyme, the Cambridge, MA-based biotech company developing drugs based on insights from epigenetics into how to turn specific genes on and off, said today it has raised $32 million in a Series B venture round.

San Francisco-based Bay City Capital led the round, which included Amgen Ventures, Astellas Venture Partners and the company’s original investors, MPM Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company has now raised $46 million since its initial financing in February 2008.

Epizyme has concentrated on making conventional small-molecule drugs designed to be the first in their class that block certain enzymes implicated in cancer, known as histone methyltransferases (HMTs). By blocking enzymes like these, the new drugs use insight from epigenetics, which says that certain genes can be turned on or off without altering the underlying DNA. Epizyme told Xconomy back in April that the company’s main focus was developing these drugs for cancer, but in today’s statement, the company said new data is emerging to suggest that drug that block HMTs might also be useful as therapies for inflammatory diseases, metabolic disorders, and neurodegenerative conditions.

“Rapid progress has been made at Epizyme,” said Kazumi Shiosaki, Epizyme’s CEO and a managing director with MPM Capital, in a statement. “With the support of our new investors as well as our existing investors, we are now in a position to progress a number of these lead programs into proof-of-concept studies.”

The new cash infusion puts Epizyme in a similarly strong financial position as a crosstown competitor, Cambridge’s Constellation Pharmaceuticals. That company, which also intends to make drugs based on the science of epigenetics, raised a $32 million Series A venture round in 2008.

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San Diego-based Axikin Pharmaceuticals has reeled in $3 million in a first round of venture financing to advance its young pipeline of drugs to treat respiratory and inflammatory diseases. The investors are Sanderling Ventures, which has offices in San Diego and San Mateo, CA, and Mitsui & Co. Venture Partners in New York, according to a company announcement.

Axikin was spun out from San Diego-based Actimis Pharmaceuticals in June 2008, when the latter company agreed to sell its lead experimental asthma drug to German drug-maker Boehringer Ingetheim in a structured buyout valued at $515 million.

Like Actimis, Axikin is developing small molecule drugs to treat respiratory disorders such as asthma, allergic rhinitis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Yet Axikin says that its molecules could have broader applications in inflammatory diseases like inflammatory dermatoses, inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis, as well as in cancer.

Axikin President Kevin Bacon says in a statement that the company plans to ask the FDA for permission to begin its first human clinical trial in the “very near future.” He did not identify which drug is its leading candidate.

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In 2005, Gonul Velicelebi was the vice president of research and drug discovery at TorreyPines Therapeutics (NASDAQ: TPTX) when scientists there determined that a molecule dubbed STIM1 played a crucial role in activating immune cells.

To Velicelebi, STIM1 was like a key that helped open a hidden pathway that scientists had been seeking for 20 years. It also opened a new path for Velicelebi, who in 2006 founded CalciMedica, a startup focused on developing a variety of small molecule drugs to suppress autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. “This is a whole new pathway for modulating immune response,” she says.

A key aspect to CalciMedica’s approach is that it appears to sidestep a buildup of toxic compounds associated with the long-term use of some drugs prescribed to prevent organ transplant rejection and to treat autoimmune diseases. “There is a huge unmet need,” Velicelebi says. “Rheumatoid arthritis alone is 2 percent of the population,” and then there is lupus and inflammatory bowel diseases, like Crohn’s disease.

The TorreyPines team had pinpointed STIM1 as a key component in … Next Page »

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San Diego-based Ardea Biosciences announced today it has entered into a securities purchase agreement with institutional investors to raise about $30.6 million from the private placement of newly issued shares of its common stock. Ardea (NASDAQ: RDEA) is focused on the discovery and development of small-molecule drugs to treat HIV, gout, cancer, and inflammatory diseases.

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Clinical Data, the Newton, MA-based maker of diagnostic tests, said today it has acquired Adenosine Therapeutics to expand its roster of drug candidates in cardiology, diabetes, inflammatory diseases, and sickle cell anemia. Clinical Data (NASDAQ: CLDA) agreed to pay $11 million in cash for the Charlottesville, VA-based Adenosine, and also entered into a $22 million, five-year promissory note and a separate $3.2 million, 32-month promissory note. Clinical Data also agreed to pay as much as $30 million more in cash if certain regulatory and commercial goals are met.

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