Facio Therapies announced today that it had successfully completed an equity financing round with proceeds of €8M (approximately A$12.5M; C$12M; US$9M). FSHD Spain and 30 other members of the FSHD community newly invested alongside existing investors, including Facio’s drug discovery partner, Evotec. Facio will use these funds to expand its recently announced in vivoproof of principle and to advance selected lead candidates towards clinical studies.

The key event in FSHD is the undue production of the DUX4 protein in skeletal muscle. DUX4 sets in motion a cascade of biochemical events that eventually result in the devastating effects of FSHD. In people without FSHD, the production of DUX4 in skeletal muscle is repressed by regulatory mechanisms. Facio’s single goal is to develop therapies that restore this repression as much as possible. Facio is the only one in the FSHD field with a fully automated, high-throughput screening platform based on quantifying the DUX4 protein in unadulterated (“primary”) FSHD-affected muscle cells. Recently, Facio delivered the first-ever proof of principle in FSHD using one of its lead candidates in a unique FSHD-relevant animal model (“in vivo”).

Three FSHD-affected families founded Facio in September 2014. Since then, Facio has raised over €16M in equity. About 77% of that amount has been invested by members of the FSHD community. Facio’s investor base now spans 14 countries around the world. FSHD Spain became the fifth FSHD foundation to invest in Facio, joining Amis FSH(France), FSHD Canada, FSHD Global Research (Australia), and the FSHD Stichting (Netherlands).

“The success of this financing round is not only that we reached our goal of raising €8 million,” said Facio’s Chairman, Kees van der Graaf. “The success is just as well that Facio’s message resonates with an ever-growing number of FSHD-affected families across the globe. We, people living with FSHD, don’t have to wait and hope for a breakthrough to happen. We’re breaking through to therapy ourselves. That is Facio’s message.”

Source: Facio

ttopstart was founded in 2009 as a university spin-off from the VU University in Amsterdam. Since then, the company has rapidly grown into one of the leading consultancy companies in the field of life sciences and health. The collaboration with PNO Group is the next step to accelerate further growth of the company.

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As the Trump administration considers policy price controls on drugs, a new report released today by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the world’s top-ranked science and technology policy think tank, highlights how price controls would have a negative effect on drug development by reducing biopharmaceutical industry investment in research, thereby slowing the pace of drug discovery. Further, price controls would damage the overall life-sciences innovation ecosystem by reducing knowledge sharing between firms.

“Biomedical innovation is critical to addressing the country’s health challenges, but developing a new drug costs between $1.5 to $2.6 billion,” said ITIF President Rob Atkinson, author of the report. “Price controls and other steps to limit prices, such as weaker intellectual property protections, would lead to less R&D and would limit overall knowledge generation and sharing critical to new drug discovery.”

The report shows that biopharmaceutical firms contribute to the overall drug innovation ecosystem because the research and development (R&D) they fund spills over both to other firms and to the public domain, helping to spur more life-sciences innovation. The report also highlights how biopharmaceutical firms contribute to knowledge sharing through providing over $2.5 billion annually for university research in all fifty states, contributing to open science through over 12,500 publications in science journals in 2017, and participating in other activities such as open consortia designed to develop and disseminate discoveries.

“Price controls will slow the pace of drug innovation, and future generations will pay the price,” Atkinson said. “Without the knowledge generation that R&D stimulates, the next generation of Americans will be left with drugs that will be less effective than they could have been.”

Read the report here.

Source: ITIF

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is an independent, nonpartisan research and educational institute focusing on the intersection of technological innovation and public policy. Recognized as the world’s leading science and technology think tank, ITIF’s mission is to formulate and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation and boost productivity to spur growth, opportunity, and progress.