Beyond Biotech - the podcast from Labiotech Beyond Biotech podcast 20: BioWin, eTherapeutics, CMT Research Foundation
5:33 e-therapeutics
21:25 BioWin
32:46 CMT Research Foundation
57:47 JLL
This week, we have three interviews, and four guests. We chatted with Keith Fargo, chief scientific officer at the CMT Research Foundation; François Colery, head of the Talent Now initiative and Sylvie Ponchaut, managing director, from BioWin; and e-therapeutics’ CEO, Ali Mortazavi.
We also have our weekly contribution from global commercial real estate services company JLL, with Robert Coughlin, managing director and New England Life Science Practice Group lead.
CMT Research Foundation supports Samsara
The CMT Research Foundation (CMTRF), a non-profit focused solely on delivering treatments and cures for Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, has invested in Samsara Therapeutics Inc.
Samsara Therapeutics is a biotech company developing several novel, orally active autophagy enhancers and demonstrated they can rescue CMT1A neuropathy in mice in a dose-dependent manner.
The partnership with Samsara Therapeutics is CMTRF’s largest investment to date and is dedicated toward a project to further optimize pipeline autophagy compounds that may eventually become a treatment option for CMT patients.
About Charcot-Marie-Tooth
Charcot-Marie-Tooth is a group of inherited, chronic peripheral neuropathies that result in nerve degradation. CMT patients suffer from progressive muscle atrophy of legs and arms causing walking, running and balance problems and abnormal hand and foot functioning. CMT affects one in 2,500 people (about the same prevalence as multiple sclerosis). At the moment, there is no treatment or cure for CMT.
BioWin helping ease job issues
BioWin, the health cluster of Wallonia in Belgium, has a Talent Now program which aims to tackle the recruitment challenges in the biotech and medtech industry in Belgium.
With the support of Walloon government and private companies (GSK, Janssen, Takeda, etc.), Talent Now is based on a study performed by BioWin that showed potential of close to 1,000 recruitments per year in biomanufacturing and R&D activities in Wallonia.
The Talent Now public-private consortium will pave the way for a EU Biotech Campus, set to open in Gosselies in 2025.
e-therapeutics completes £13.5M fundraise
e-therapeutics plc, a company integrating computational power and biological data to discover life-transforming RNAi medicines, recently announced a fundraise of £13.5 million before expenses by way of a subscription for new ordinary shares.
The fundraise allows the company to generate value and accelerate the next stage of its growth, advancing its position in creating an entirely new template for drug discovery using computation to capture and model disease complexity, identify novel targets and design RNAi drugs against those targets that can be rapidly progressed to the clinic.
The net proceeds of the Subscription will be used to facilitate initiatives to accelerate growth, with a focus on expanding the Company’s in-house pipeline of first-in-class RNAi candidates derived from ETX’s computational platform; further developing cell type-specific computational tools and datasets; and general working capital including additional headcount.
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