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STAT+: Biotech raises $42 million to run Huntington’s disease trial

Gene therapy startup Latus Bio has raised another $42 million to start its first clinical trials, where it will try to sidestep issues that have set back a more advanced competitor. 

Latus is moving two treatments through clinical trials this year. The first is for a form of Batten disease called CLN2 disease, a fatal genetic condition that causes seizures, vision loss, and cognitive problems. The company anticipates having initial clinical data by the end of the year. 

Now, Latus — founded by Beverly Davidson, chief scientific strategy officer at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia — is turning its attention to a second drug candidate, a gene therapy for Huntington’s disease.

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Immigration changes are driving foreign researchers to leave the U.S. — or not come to begin with 

The budding scientist had left India for the U.S. for her Ph.D., because as she saw it, no other country offered the same opportunities for researchers. Set to finish her doctorate this summer, she also had a postdoctoral fellowship lined up in America.

Now those plans have changed. New and intrusive burdens for renewing a component of her visa — which required her to make public her social media profiles for U.S. review while she was back in India — caused her to be away from the lab for two months during the crunch time of wrapping up her degree. 

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Opinion: STAT+: China’s strict new supply chain regulations could create massive problems for Western biopharma companies

A recently published paper delivers a finding that should be well known to every executive in Western pharma: China has gone from accounting for less than 8% of global clinical trials in 2010 to surpassing the United States in annual registered trial volume by 2020, reaching more than 5,000 trials per year in 2024. Eighty-eight percent of that growth, among private-sector sponsors, was driven by domestic Chinese firms, not multinationals relocating R&D.

China is not just a manufacturing base for the West’s drug supply chain. It is now a peer competitor in drug innovation — and it intends to stay that way on its own terms.

Toward that end, on April 7, China’s State Council issued Decree No. 834, the Regulations on Industrial and Supply Chain Security, effective immediately, with no transition period. Its 18 articles give Beijing sweeping new powers to investigate and sanction any foreign company whose commercial decisions are deemed to harm China’s industrial chain security. China’s 15th five-year plan has explicitly designated biotechnology and pharmaceuticals as the centerpiece of its next phase of industrial development. Decree No. 834 is the legal infrastructure through which Beijing intends to protect and leverage that ambition.

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