On October 3, 2017 Cullinan Oncology, LLC reported a $150 million Series A financing co-led by the UBS Oncology Impact Fund (OIF) managed by MPM Capital, a worldwide leader in oncology investing, and F2 Ventures (Press release, Cullinan Oncology, OCT 3, 2017, https://www.cullinanoncology.com/2017/10/03/cullinan-oncology-secures-150-million-series-a-financing-to-build-innovative-development-company/ [SID1234520759]). Created by MPM Capital, Cullinan was formed to develop high-value oncology therapeutics with a unique, cost-efficient business model.

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"MPM continues to seek innovative ways to finance and develop new therapies in the increasingly dynamic oncology marketplace," said Ansbert Gadicke, Chairman of Cullinan and MPM Co-Founder. "We have assembled a diverse team of seasoned executives, and we have confidence in their ability to generate novel therapies and strong returns."

Cullinan Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer and MPM Managing Director Patrick Baeuerle stated, "We look forward to capitalizing on recent scientific breakthroughs across a broad range of cancer targets and therapeutic modalities. The pace of discovery in oncology is nearly unmatched, and will continue to drive better outcomes for patients."

Led by an accomplished team of oncology researchers, biopharma executives and experienced entrepreneurs, Cullinan is a company predicated on distributing risk while maximizing optionality through the construction of a diversified portfolio of internally developed as well as externally sourced oncology assets. Cullinan’s scalable model minimizes the fixed costs and inefficiencies of many traditional development approaches through strategic partnerships and a shared services platform.

"This capital infusion, coupled with the talent and structural advantages of Cullinan, positions us well to execute our vision of building a portfolio of assets geared towards dramatically improving the standard of care for those living with cancer," stated Owen Hughes, Cullinan CEO and MPM Managing Director.

World Class Management

CEO Owen Hughes joined Cullinan from Intarcia Therapeutics, where he served as the Chief Business Officer and Head of Corporate Development. While at Intarcia, he was responsible for business development, M&A, and financing, including one of the largest ex-US licensing deals to date. In addition, he helped raise approximately $1.8 billion in private capital through various equity, debt and royalty structures. Prior to Intarcia, Hughes accumulated over 16 years of Wall Street experience, most notably as a director at Bain Capital Public Equity.

Having played key roles in multiple breakthrough oncology therapies, Cullinan’s highly distinguished scientific management team includes:

Patrick Baeuerle, PhD, Cullinan’s Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Biologics, and MPM Managing Director. An immune oncology pioneer, Baeuerle has co-founded MPM oncology start-ups Harpoon, TCR², iOmx, and Maverick, and led the development of BiTE antibody Blincyto, which was approved within three months by the U.S. FDA for relapsed/refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Prior to Cullinan and MPM, Baeuerle served as Vice President, Research and General Manager of Amgen Research Munich GmbH, and Chief Scientific Officer of Micromet from 1998-2012. To date, he has published 238 PubMed-listed papers that have been cited more than 64,000 times.
Leigh Zawel, PhD, Cullinan’s Chief Scientific Officer, Small Molecules and MPM Managing Director. Zawel is an oncology expert with significant pharmaceutical experience over-seeing large and small molecule projects at Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi-Aventis and Novartis. Most recently, Zawel was Vice President and East Coast Site Head for Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation where he managed a portfolio of large and small molecule projects spanning oncology, immunology and rare disease from which five clinical stage programs emerged in five years.
Briggs Morrison, MD, Clinical Advisor to Cullinan and MPM Managing Director. Dr. Morrison is also the CEO of Syndax Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SNDX), an MPM portfolio company. His distinguished career includes leading roles at AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Merck, with direct involvement in the development of oncology drugs Zolinza, Lynparza, Iressa & Tagrisso.
Complementing the clinical leadership is a team of business development and financial executives that provide deep industry experience to guide Cullinan’s future progress, including:

Corinne Savill, PhD, Cullinan’s Chief Business Officer. An accomplished pharmaceutical executive, Savill was most recently at Novartis, where she was Head of Business Development and Licensing for the Pharma Division, and previously led Pricing and Market Access and the European Transplant Business Unit for Novartis. Savill started her career in research roles at AstraZeneca and Imutran Ltd. in the UK.
Kristen Laguerre, MBA, Cullinan’s CFO and MPM Managing Director, Finance. With 18 years of financial leadership and management experience in the venture industry, Laguerre was most recently Partner and CFO at Flare Capital Partners and, previously, at Atlas Venture and SoftBank Capital. She began her early career at Arthur Andersen LLP.
About Cullinan

On October 2, 2017 KSQ Therapeutics reported that they emerged with $76 million in financing and a world-class executive team to advance the development of drugs empowered by the unique biological insights of its proprietary CRISPRomics drug discovery engine (Press release, KSQ Therapeutics, OCT 2, 2017, View Source [SID1234520709]). With CRISPRomics, KSQ is pioneering high-confidence drug development utilizing a suite of CRISPR-based technologies that industrialize, for the first time, a high-throughput, systematic way to elucidate the precise function that each human gene plays across a multitude of diseases. Based on this deep and comprehensive approach, KSQ is advancing a pipeline of oncology and immunology drug development programs against novel therapeutic nodes to create a new set of disease-tailored medicines. KSQ was founded in 2015 by David Sabatini, MD, PhD, of the Whitehead Institute and MIT, William Hahn, MD, PhD, of the Broad Institute and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Jonathan Weissman, PhD, of UCSF, and Tim Wang, PhD, of MIT, along with founding investors Flagship Pioneering and Polaris Partners.

KSQ also announced today the appointment of David Meeker, MD, as Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Meeker most recently served as Head of the Specialty Care Business Unit of Sanofi-Genzyme and previously was Chief Executive Officer and President of Genzyme, a Sanofi Company. He brings more than 20 years of industry leadership experience, from leading-edge R&D programs to global operational roles.

"We have a clear goal with CRISPRomics: empower the drug development process to strategically focus on high-confidence, patient-tailored, novel drug candidates," said Dr. Meeker. "There is a compelling need to improve the quality of drug targets and to identify patients most likely to respond because our industry and our health care systems are challenged by the sheer volume of potential new medicines. With our proprietary CRISPRomics engine, KSQ is positioned to play a leading role in shortening drug development timelines, increasing the rate at which meaningful medicines can reach patients, and ultimately, improving the sustainability of our health care systems."

KSQ also announced Frank Stegmeier, PhD, as Chief Scientific Officer and George Golumbeski, PhD, as Executive Advisor and Board Member. Dr. Stegmeier is a leading expert in industrialized functional genomics who led Oncology Target Discovery at Novartis prior to joining KSQ. He has led KSQ’s platform development and R&D efforts since the company’s formation in 2015, demonstrating the early productivity of CRISPRomics. Dr. Golumbeski is a business development executive with an outstanding track record of success in the pharmaceutical industry. During his more than 25-year career, he has identified and evaluated innovative technologies and drug candidates from early-stage biotech companies and accelerated their drug innovation potential through creative partnerships.

"The human genome harbors more than 20,000 genes, however for most diseases we have yet to discern which genes represent the best therapeutic targets. For the first time, CRISPRomics allows us to systematically pinpoint the optimal nodal targets of disease with extraordinary precision and speed," said Dr. Stegmeier. "The genome-scale insights that are possible with CRISPRomics are enabling KSQ to most efficiently focus our drug discovery efforts on the development of medicines with the greatest potential to intervene in disease and, therefore, impact the lives of patients."

KSQ’s financing is led by Flagship Pioneering; Polaris Partners, ARCH Venture Partners, and Alexandria Equities also participated. Since the company’s formation in 2015, KSQ has deployed its CRISPRomics engine to complete the functional assessment of each gene in more than 600 tumor and immune models. The company has compiled new insights in disease biology to identify novel drug targets and new drug combinations designed to elicit maximal impact on disease. This approach has produced KSQ’s initial pipeline of drug development programs, and will serve as a product engine across a wide range of disease areas for the company and future collaborators. KSQ has grown to a team of more than 40 employees.

"KSQ is a pioneering company, unleashing high-confidence drug development for the first time — a step change in the way drugs are discovered and developed," said David Berry, General Partner, Flagship Pioneering. "Led by proven industry leaders, KSQ is uniquely positioned to translate its breakthrough biological insights into therapeutics that can impact the core of many important diseases."

High-Confidence Drug Development
Powered by CRISPRomics, KSQ has elucidated the function that each human gene plays in a multitude of diseases providing a unique and more comprehensive understanding of disease biology. The quality of these insights enables KSQ to identify a multitude of high-confidence, patient-tailored, novel programs for drug development and rapidly rule-out thousands of less relevant targets from the outset; thereby, focusing R&D investment on the development of medicines with the greatest potential to meaningfully impact the treatment of human disease.

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Soligenix, Inc. (the "Company") has updated its corporate presentation (the "Presentation") to include updates to the Presentation since it was last included as an exhibit to the Company’s Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange on June 8, 2017 (Filing, 8-K, Soligenix, SEP 29, 2017, View Source [SID1234520714]).

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The Company updated the Presentation to reflect the receipt of approximately $3.7 million in non-dilutive funding. The National Institutes of Health (the "NIH") awarded the Company approximately $1.5 million over two years to support the conduct of its pivotal Phase 3 clinical trial evaluating SGX301 (synthetic hypericin) as a treatment for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. Further, the NIH granted the Company an additional award of approximately $1.5 million over two years to support the conduct of its pivotal Phase 3 clinical trial of SGX942 (dusquetide) as a treatment for severe oral mucositis in patients with head and neck cancer receiving chemoradiation therapy. Finally, the Company will be participating in a grant awarded to the University of Hawai’i at Manoa for the development of a thermostabilized Ebola vaccine, with the Company awarded funding of approximately $700,000 over five years.

Additionally, the Company updated the estimated timeframe for the Phase 3 clinical trial of SGX301 development milestone, as its achievement may have the potential to occur later in the year.

On September 28, 2017 ZIOPHARM Oncology, Inc. (Nasdaq:ZIOP), a biopharmaceutical company focusing on new immunotherapies, reported the appointment of David Mauney, M.D., as Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer effective from September 28, 2017 (Press release, Ziopharm, SEP 28, 2017, View Source [SID1234520697]). ZIOPHARM also reports the details of an inducement award granted to Dr. Mauney, approved by the Compensation Committee of the Company’s Board of Directors in connection with his employment.

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Dr. Mauney joins ZIOPHARM from Harvest Capital Strategies, LLC, where he served as a Managing Director. With twenty years of experience in the raising, management and disposition of almost $900 million in life science venture capital, Dr. Mauney will lead ZIOPHARM’s corporate development and investor strategy functions, reporting directly to Laurence Cooper, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of ZIOPHARM.

"David brings to our executive leadership team a wealth of entrepreneurial experience, keen insights and multiple relationships that will leverage existing and future capital markets and corporate partnership opportunities, all of which will support our core portfolio of immunotherapy platforms," said Dr. Cooper. "I look forward to working with David at this important stage of growth for the Company, as we continue to advance the development of our innovative gene expression, control, and cell technologies."

Prior to Harvest Capital Strategies LLC, Dr. Mauney co-founded and served as a Managing Director of De Novo Ventures, a health care investment firm founded in 2000. Dr. Mauney was also the Lead Partner of Health Care Investments for Asset Management Company, and he was the first employee and Director of Business Development for Fox Hollow Technologies, which later went public and was ultimately sold to EV3. Dr. Mauney holds an M.D. from the Dartmouth School of Medicine and a B.A. in psychology from Duke University.

ZIOPHARM also announces that David Connolly recently joined the Company as Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations.

Mr. Connolly brings more than 15 years’ experience in corporate communications, public relations and investor relations experience to ZIOPHARM. Prior to joining ZIOPHARM, he served as Senior Vice President at JPA Health Communications and before that, LaVoieHealthScience, both communications agencies where he was the strategic lead for integrated communications, public relations and advocacy programs for public and private biopharmaceutical and medical device companies. Mr. Connolly holds a B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross.

Inducement Award Granted to David Mauney, M.D.

ZIOPHARM announces that as an inducement material to Dr. Mauney entering into employment with the Company, the Compensation Committee of ZIOPHARM’s Board of Directors granted an inducement award to Dr. Mauney in accordance with NASDAQ Listing Rule 5635(c)(4). The inducement award consists of a stock option to purchase up to 500,000 shares of the Company’s common stock, with a per share exercise price equal to $6.19, the closing price of the Company’s common stock on the grant date of September 28, 2017, the date of Dr. Mauney’s first day of employment with ZIOPHARM, and a ten-year term. The stock option was granted outside of, but subject to the terms generally consistent with, the Company’s 2012 Equity Incentive Plan, as amended, and will vest with respect to one-third of the shares subject to the stock option award on the first anniversary of the grant date and with respect to remaining two-thirds in two annual installments on each of the second and third anniversaries of the grant date, subject to Dr. Mauney’s continuous service with the Company through each applicable vesting date and may be eligible for potential vesting acceleration under certain circumstances pursuant to the terms of Dr. Mauney’s stock option award agreement.

Three biotech companies focusing on cancer and eye diseases have collectively raised more than $300 million (Press release, FierceBiotech, SEP 28, 2017, View Source;utm_medium=rss [SID1234520700]).

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Kinase inhibitor biotech Deciphera Pharmaceuticals raised $128 million, at the high-end of the range, with British cancer oncology NuCana, which is working on second-generation chemotherapies for resistant tumors, raising $100 million, and within the range.

Fellow British biotech Nightstar Therapeutics, a gene therapy player working on rare retinal diseases, also got off a $75 million IPO, within the midpoint of the range.

After a lackluster biotech IPO market in 2016 and a slow start to this year, public offerings for life sciences have started to take off in the second half.

Deciphera has a pipeline of oral drug candidates that include three clinical-stage and two research-stage programs. Its lead drug candidate, DCC-2618, is designed to stop mutant or amplified KIT and PDGFRα kinases that drive cancers such as gastrointestinal stromal tumors, or GIST.

It’s currently in phase 1, and at this year’s ASCO (Free ASCO Whitepaper) Deciphera posted data showing that in GIST patients shown to harbor a broad range of KIT and PDGFRα mutations, it saw a disease control rate of 85% at eight weeks in 27 patients, 78% at 12 weeks in 23 patients and 60% at 24 weeks in 15 patients.

The biotech is also working on small molecule drug candidates, DCC-3014 and rebastinib, as immuno-oncology kinase, or immunokinase, switch control inhibitors targeting colony stimulating factor receptor 1, or CSF1R, and the TIE2 kinase, respectively.

Back in June, Deciphera raised $52 million in a series C, building on the $75 million it raised in 2015 during its series B round. Its largest stakeholder had been Brightstar Associates, which owned nearly 68% of the company.

At the time of its B round, its pipeline was led by altiratinib, which acts on the MET/TIE2/VEGFR2 pathways, but that asset no longer appears in the company’s R&D pipeline and seems to have been canned.

Edinburgh, U.K.-based NuCana, meanwhile, had been seeking a top $115 million IPO, but got a little less at $100 million.

The cash boost should still be enough to help fund late-phase trials of NuCana’s reformulated cancer candidates, including a version of Eli Lilly’s Gemzar it hopes will supplant the veteran chemotherapy in some indications.

The biotech has built its pipeline upon the same phosphoramidate chemistry approach that underpins Gilead’s hepatitis C blockbuster Sovaldi.

NuCana has used the approach to add a phosphate group protected by groupings of aryl, ester and amino acids to existing drugs. In doing so, NuCana thinks it has created drugs free from the membrane transport, activation and breakdown issues that render cancers resistant to the products they are based on.

The company was down to the last $16 million of its $57 million series B by the end of June, meaning this IPO was a key financial driver for its future, as it eyes later stage tests across a broad range of tumors.

And finally Nightstar, which had filed for an $86 million IPO and managed $75 million, will equip the biotech to complete a phase 3 trial of its choroideremia gene therapy and advance two other eye disease candidates through early-stage clinical studies.

London-based Nightstar, also known as NightstaRx, is set to move the choroideremia asset into phase 3 in the first half of next year. The therapy, NSR-REP1, is advancing into the 140-patient trial on the strength of data on 32 subjects treated in investigator-sponsored studies. Those trials found 90% of patients either maintained or improved their visual acuity in the year after receiving the gene therapy.

The biotech was originally spun out of the University of Oxford in 2014, starting life with a £12 million raise from Syncona.

It pulled in a further £5 million when it named former Johnson & Johnson VP David Fellows as CEO early in 2015, with a $35 million series B round following later that year. And Nightstar broadened its investor base and raised a further $45 million in a series C round just a few months ago.