Frank Vinluan
Xconomy Editor Frank Vinluan is a business journalist with experience covering 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.
Recent posts
Denali Therapeutics has selected a brain-penetrating Parkinson’s disease drug candidate to advance to late-stage testing, and Biogen is paying $1 billion to kick off a partnership on that compound and potentially... Read more »
Telemedicine giant Teladoc Health is buying health technology company Livongo Health in an $18.5 billion cash and stock deal that comes as the COVID-19 pandemic drives patients to seek ways to... Read more »
One of the challenges facing cell therapy developers is collecting enough cells to produce a viable treatment. It’s a particularly pronounced problem for therapies employing regulatory T cells (Tregs), a type... Read more »
A partnership between Voyager Therapeutics and AbbVie developing gene therapies for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease has ended without a drug for either disease reaching human testing.
Voyager (NASDAQ: VYGR) announced... Read more »
A MorphoSys antibody drug developed for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) has won FDA approval, providing an alternative to cumbersome and risky CAR-T therapies to treat the cancer.
The late... Read more »
Kymera Therapeutics has a pipeline of preclinical drug candidates that use an experimental approach to get rid of disease-causing proteins and it’s now looking to tap the public markets to finance... Read more »
The biotech IPO market is buzzing but Cerevel Therapeutics is showing that there’s more than one path to the public markets. This week the neuroscience drug developer reached a deal to... Read more »
AlloVir is the latest biotech company to go public, raising about $276.3 million to pull its cell therapies off the shelf and run multiple clinical trials testing them in stem cell... Read more »
As the Alzheimer’s disease world continues to closely follow the development of therapies that break up clumps of beta amyloid on patients’ brains, Roche is placing a bet on another approach... Read more »
The promise of gene therapies and gene-editing drugs is a long-lasting treatment that’s potentially a cure. But making permanent genetic changes means any accompanying problems could be long-lasting as well, says... Read more »
Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine research started with multiple approaches—four shots on the messenger RNA goal. The partners have narrowed their choices to one for pivotal testing, and that candidate... Read more »
AstraZeneca’s partnership with Daiichi Sankyo led to FDA approval of an antibody cancer drug late last year. Now the British pharmaceutical giant is paying $1 billion up front to join forces... Read more »
The FDA on Friday approved a Gilead Sciences drug developed for treating mantle cell lymphoma, paving the way for the company to commercialize its second cancer cell therapy.
Approval for the... Read more »
The FDA has lifted a hold on clinical trials for an experimental CymaBay Therapeutics drug in three liver diseases, clearing the way for tests to resume in all of them. But... Read more »
It’s not enough for a cell or gene therapy to reach a cell, it must also get inside it to access most of the validated drug targets. Vesigen Therapeutics is developing... Read more »
The biotech IPO queue has added two more companies. Freeline Therapeutics and Checkmate Pharmaceuticals have each filed the regulatory paperwork to offer shares to the public.
Freeline is raising cash to... Read more »
Scientists know that proteins called solute carrier (SLC) transporters move substances important to metabolism across cellular membranes. But can drugs effectively hit these proteins to treat disease? Roche is paying startup... Read more »
Forge Biologics has something rare for most early-stage biotech startups: revenue from customers. Now it has $40 million to expand its model, which places contract manufacturing alongside the development of its... Read more »
GlaxoSmithKline is expanding its capabilities in messenger RNA (mRNA) research through a new alliance with CureVac spanning up to five programs targeting infectious disease pathogens.
In addition to mRNA vaccines, those... Read more »
Summer’s arrival hasn’t slowed the momentum of the biotech IPO market. Wall Street this week welcomed six new life science industry companies, which collectively raised more than $1 billion in their... Read more »
