Four months after stepping down from Acceleron Pharma (NASDAQ: XLRN) as chief medical officer, Robert Zeldin has been appointed to the chief medical position at Immunovant. Zeldin’s experience also includes roles at Ablynx, Merck (NYSE: MRK), and Novartis (NYSE: NVS). Immunovant, which splits its operations between New York and Basel, Switzerland, is developing treatments for […]

[Updated, 11:04 am ET, see below] Deciphera Pharmaceuticals this morning announced plans to seek FDA approval of a cancer medicine that treats a deadly type of tumor that forms in the gastrointestinal tract. The Deciphera (NASDASQ: DCPH) drug, ripretinib, hit its main goal in a Phase 3 trial, INVICTUS, in 129 patients with gastrointestinal stromal […]

Jack Bailey, president of US pharmaceuticals for GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK), will step down from the role at the end of the year. The British pharmaceutical giant said Monday that Bailey will be succeeded by Maya Martinez-Davis, regional president of Latin America for EMD Serono, the biopharma business of Germany-based Merck KGaA. Martinez-Davis’s experience also includes […]

After less than one year on the job, Melinta Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MLNT) CEO John Johnson has resigned “due to changes in the company’s circumstances and in order to pursue other opportunities,” the antibiotics developer announced Friday. He also stepped down from the Morristown, NJ-based company’s board of directors. Melinta said Johnson will serve as acting […]

Versant Ventures and Bayer have started several biotechs together. But today marks the first time the German drug maker takes a step further and buys one of them: cell therapy developer BlueRock Therapeutics. Bayer already owns a 40.8 percent stake in BlueRock through its Leaps by Bayer venture arm. But it will pay $240 million […]

Organovo says it has run out of money to advance its efforts to develop 3-D “patches” of living human liver tissue to tide over people waiting for an organ transplant. The San Diego-based biotech has been working since 2007 to use a method known as bio-printing to come up with such a product, which Organovo […]

Urinary tract infections are among the most common bacterial infections in the United States, but treatment options are shrinking as resistance to antibiotics commonly prescribed to treat the condition continues to rise. Luca Biologics, a new Cambridge, MA-based biotech focused on women’s health, emerged Tuesday with a plan to advance an investigational UTI drug into […]

[Updated 1:33 p.m.] Intra-Cellular Therapies will have to wait another three months to see whether the FDA will approve its experimental drug for schizophrenia, which has produced mixed results in human studies but is currently under a regulatory review. The New York company said Monday that the FDA has pushed back the deadline for its […]

We’re in the midst of earnings season, and a couple of San Diego’s publicly traded biotechs recently updated investors this week with sales data and other financial insights. Here’s a look at those companies. —Acadia Pharmaceuticals faced a setback in July with the failure of a late-stage trial that was testing pimavanserin—which the company’s sells […]

Gene therapy developer Adverum Biotechnologies (NASDAQ: ADVM) announced Thursday that Mehdi Gasmi, the company’s president and chief scientific officer, is retiring. When Gasmi retires on Sept. 16, he will join the Menlo Park, CA, company’s board of directors. He will also serve as a consultant to the business for six months. Adverum says a search […]