Frank Vinluan
Frank is a business journalist with more than a decade of experience covering various aspects of technology and life sciences. Based in Raleigh, he was a staff writer at the Triangle Business Journal covering technology, biotechnology and energy before joining MedCityNews.com as North Carolina bureau chief. Prior to moving to North Carolina’s Research Triangle in 2007 he held business reporting positions at The Des Moines Register and The Seattle Times. Frank has a bachelor’s degree in history from Carleton College and a master’s degree in public affairs reporting from the University of Illinois Springfield.
Recent posts
If Nektar Therapeutics wins FDA approval this summer for an opioid painkiller it designed to be less addictive than other opioids, another company will usher the new product onto the market.... Read more »
Ideaya Biosciences and Bicycle Therapeutics priced their IPOs late Wednesday, raising a combined $110 million to continue clinical trials of their respective experimental cancer drugs.
South San Francisco-based Ideaya raised $50... Read more »
Agrilyst, an agtech startup that has commercialized software that helps manage indoor farms and greenhouses, is unveiling a new name and additional capital. The company is now called Artemis and it... Read more »
In healthy people, viruses are kept in check by the immune system. But for immunocompromised patients, such as those undergoing transplant procedures, a viral infection is potentially deadly. AlloVir is developing... Read more »
Merck has reached a deal to acquire Peloton Therapeutics, and its Phase 3-ready kidney cancer drug, for $1.05 billion.
Under the agreement announced Tuesday, Merck (NYSE: MRK) will pay the... Read more »
Generic drugs are supposed to give consumers more choices and a counterweight to more costly branded medications. During his tenure as FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb often spoke about generics as a... Read more »
Microbes designed by Ginkgo Bioworks are used in consumer products such as fragrances and beverages, and they’re undergoing research for applications in agriculture and medicine. The synthetic biology company has been... Read more »
When a biotech startup is ready to test an experimental therapy it faces a pricey choice: Should it make its drug in-house, or hire a contract manufacturer? The decision is particularly... Read more »
It will be hard to top last year’s flurry of biotech companies joining the public markets, but this week is shaping up to be the busiest for life science IPOs in... Read more »
Goldfinch Bio set out to build a database of patients with kidney diseases, which it could study to understand the biology and genetics of kidney disorders in order to develop better... Read more »
The first new class of migraine drugs in decades won FDA approval last year. But the companies who commercialized these new therapies and their potential competitors are already planning new,... Read more »
A Beyond Meat burger is coming to a location near you—and soon. The food technology company’s upsized IPO has raised $241 million to finance plans to bring its plant-based “meat” to... Read more »
Drugs that treat dogs and cats are some of Elanco’s fastest growing products, and the animal health company is poised to make that category even bigger through a deal to buy... Read more »
The road to every new drug approval is littered with the remains of earlier failures. Biopharmaceutical companies don’t like to talk about the failures. But it’s earnings season now, so some... Read more »
[Updated 1:49 p.m. ET. See below.] An experimental Gilead Sciences treatment for the severe fatty liver disease NASH failed to beat a placebo in Phase 3 testing—the second time... Read more »
With a second big clinical failure, Teva Pharmaceutical is abandoning efforts to extend the use of its approved migraine drug to the treatment of cluster headaches, a rarer form... Read more »
The lines between biotech and high tech are blurring, and Seattle is one of the country’s hotspots for this convergence. IT innovations for analyzing big data are finding applications in drug... Read more »
Merck’s blockbuster immunotherapy has notched FDA approval for treating the most serious cases of kidney cancer.
The FDA on Monday approved Merck (NYSE: MRK) drug pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in combination with... Read more »
Hookipa Pharma has raised $84 million in an initial public offering that will fund development of experimental treatments developed to reprogram the immune system to treat infectious diseases and cancer.
But... Read more »
Arrakis Therapeutics has been scouting elusive pharmaceutical quarry: small molecules able to “drug” RNA, the molecular messengers that carry the genetic instructions for proteins. Most drugs in use today act on... Read more »
