Vedere Bio, a stealth-stage company focused on advancing optogenetic therapies that are delivered to the retina to restore functional vision, has been acquired by Novartis. Shareholders in Vedere Bio received $150 million upfront and will be eligible for up to $130 million in milestone payments, for a total of $280 million. Vedere Bio was formed […]

Sartorius is expanding its presence in Massachusetts with a 40,000-square-foot North American Customer Interaction Center in Marlborough that will open in early 2021. The Customer Interaction Center initiative will enable Sartorius to scale up its operations and capabilities in the Boston biotech hub. The new site in Marlborough also will provide the capacity to support […]

Boston Properties has announced a 138,000 square-foot, 10-year lease with Lexington-based Translate Bio, a clinical-stage messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics company, at 200 West Street in Waltham. Boston Properties is currently redeveloping 200 West Street into lab space with expected completion in 2021. Translate Bio is a clinical-stage mRNA therapeutics company developing a new class of potentially transformative medicines to treat diseases […]

The FDA has granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Eli Lilly’s investigational drug bamlanivimab, a recombinant, neutralizing human IgG1 monoclonal antibody (mAb) directed against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. Bamlanivimab is designed to block viral attachment and entry into human cells, thus neutralizing the virus, potentially treating COVID-19. Bamlanivimab emerged from the collaboration between Lilly and AbCellera to create […]

Congratulations to Sanofi, who was just named the 2020 Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA) Overall Winner at the 2020 FOYA Banquet during the virtual 2020 ISPE Annual Meeting & Expo. Sanofi was awarded the 2020 FOYA Facility of the Future Category Award in April 2020 for its Sanofi Digitally Enabled Integrated Continuous Biomanufacturing Facility in Framingham. This […]

Waltham-based PerkinElmer will acquire cell engineering company Horizon for approximately $383 million with the transaction expected to close in the first quarter of 2021. With this investment, PerkinElmer will expand its portfolio of leading, automated life sciences discovery and applied genomics solutions to include gene editing and gene modulation tools. The acquisition will enable PerkinElmer […]

Cambridge biotech Foghorn Therapeutics’ common stock began trading on The Nasdaq Global Market on October 23. The gross proceeds of the initial public offering are expected to be approximately $120 million. Foghorn Therapeutics is discovering and developing a novel class of medicines targeting genetically determined dependencies within the chromatin regulatory system which regulates which genes are expressed to […]

Scorpion Therapeutics has closed a $108 million Series A financing. The company is integrating cutting-edge technologies across target discovery, medicinal chemistry, and translational medicine to deliver the next generation of precision oncology medicines. Scorpion will focus initially on three key efforts: designing best or first-in-class drugs against known oncogenes; drugging known – but classically undruggable […]

Eli Lilly has announced it will acquire Cambridge-based Disarm Therapeutics, a privately-held biotech creating a new class of disease-modifying therapeutics for patients with axonal degeneration, a central driver of neurological disability and disease progression. Disarm has discovered novel, potent SARM1 inhibitors and is advancing them in preclinical development, with the goal of delivering breakthrough treatments […]

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, Berlin, Germany “for the development of a method for genome editing,” specifically the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors. Using this tool, researchers can change the DNA […]