Adheron Therapeutics, Inc.

Hari Kumar, former CEO of Adheron Therapeutics, Inc. appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors Thierry Fumeaux, MD, former member of Swiss National Covid Taskforce, joined Kinarus as new Chief Medical Officer BASEL, SWITZERLAND / ACCESSWIRE / April 26, 2021 / Kinarus AG, a Swiss clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company and owner of KIN001, a differentiated therapeutic candidate for the treatment of multiple diseases with high unmet need, announced today the appointment of Hari Kumar as Chairman of the Board of Directors and Thierry Fumeaux as Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Hari Kumar's long career took him from Roche to Eisai Ltd where he served as European Marketing Director. He returned to Roche as Global Head of Transplant Immunosuppressives. He subsequently moved to Amira Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 2007 as Chief Business Officer before becoming Chief Executive Officer of Adheron Therapeutics Inc. In his career, Dr. Kumar oversaw the launch of the immunosuppressive, CellCept®, the Alzheimer's drug, Aricept® and the gastric ulcer drug, Aciphex®. At Amira, Dr. Kumar led the process that resulted in its acquisition by Bristol Myers Squibb in 2011. He also navigated the acquisition of Adheron Therapeutics by Roche, in his role as CEO/ Board member. These transactions have delivered over a billion dollars in returns to investors. Dr. Thierry Fumeaux, MD, MBA joined Kinarus as its Chief Medical Officer. In his new role, he will lead the Kinarus clinical development programs and the direction of the clinical strategy of the company. Dr. Fumeaux is a specialist in internal and intensive care medicine, with extensive clinical experience as Head of the Intensive Care Unit and the Internal Medicine Department of the hospital of Nyon. He was a member of the Swiss National Covid Scientific Task Force as president of its Clinical Care Expert group. He was also president of the Swiss Society of Intensive Care Medicine, from 2018 to 2020. The successful addition of these two experienced industry executives to the Kinarus team marks a further key step in the build-out of Kinarus. Just two weeks ago, Kinarus announced enrolment of the first patient in its recently launched Phase 2 clinical trial of KIN001 in COVID-19 hospitalized patients. The Swiss biopharmaceutical company plans additional clinical programs to evaluate KIN001 for treatment of patients with age-related macular degeneration (wet-AMD) as well as Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF). Incoming Chairman Hari Kumar remarked that "Kinarus has made an exceptionally good start into the new year. I am very honored to join this exciting Swiss biopharmaceutical company and look forward to leading and supporting Kinarus and its team into a promising future." About Kinarus Kinarus AG is a Swiss clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on bringing differentiated treatments to patients suffering from viral, respiratory, or ophthalmic diseases. Kinarus' differentiated therapeutic candidate KIN001 has broad potential to transform numerous therapeutic areas. The company has patent protected and is preparing the application of KIN001 in multiple indications with important unmet medical needs. In March 2021, the company has received a CHF 3 million financial facility after independent scientific assessment for KIN001 development in COVID-19 and ongoing operations. In April 2021, Kinarus enrolled and dosed the first patient in a Phase 2 study for KIN001 in COVID-19 in hospitalized patients. Swiss-based Kinarus is privately owned. The Board of Directors of the company is currently evaluating different financing options. For more information, please visit the company's website at . Contact information: Alexander Bausch CEO Kinarus AG Tel: +41 61 633 2971 alexander.bausch@kinarus.com Disclaimer This communication does not constitute an offer or invitation to subscribe for or purchase any securities of Kinarus AG. This publication may contain certain forward-looking statements and assessments or intentions concerning the company and its business. Such statements involve certain risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause the actual results, financial condition, performance or achievements of the company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such statements. Readers should therefore not place reliance on these statements, particularly not in connection with any contract or investment decision. The company disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, assessments or intentions. SOURCE: Kinarus AG View source version on accesswire.com:

Overall, the Swiss-based Roche announced a group sales increase of 7 percent, with the Pharmaceuticals Division up 7 percent, largely driven by sales of Ocrevus, Perjeta, Alecensa and Tecentriq. It’s not uncommon for biopharma companies to ditch early-stage drugs from their pipelines, nor is it uncommon for them to bury the news deep in their quarterly reports. That was definitely the case of Roche , who announced their third-quarter financials today. Overall, the Swiss-based Roche announced a group sales increase of 7 percent, with the Pharmaceuticals Division up 7 percent, largely driven by sales of Ocrevus, Perjeta, Alecensa and Tecentriq. The Diagnostics Division sales grew by 6 percent on the backs of its immunodiagnostic solutions. And the company remains optimistic for the entire year, project 7 percent or greater overall, with the Pharmaceutical Division projected more than 13 percent in the U.S. and an overall 7 percent increase. Sales for the Pharma Division are expected to be down 2 percent in Europe, however. “In the first nine months of the year, both our Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics Divisions achieved very strong sales growth,” stated Severin Schwan, Roche’s chief executive officer. “The uptake of our new medicines continued to be strong in the third quarter. I am also very pleased that following the recent additional FDA approval, Hemlibra is now broadly available in the U.S. for people with hemophilia A. Based on the performance in the first nine months of the year, we will achieve our full-year targets.” But the company is also cleaning house a bit, eliminating a total of eight pipeline programs. In many cases, it means it won’t have to pay out various milestone payments to companies it licensed the products from. The most advanced is RG1569 for systemic sclerosis, which was in Phase III. RG6125, an anti-cadherin 11 antibody that was in a Phase II clinical trial for rheumatoid arthritis last year, was abandoned. The company picked up the drug in 2015 when it acquired Adheron Therapeutics for $105 million upfront. RG6125 was the only Phase II pipeline drug to be dropped. In its Phase I pipeline, abandoned programs include RG6029, a NaV1.7 inhibitor Roche licensed from Xenon Pharmaceuticals , which it acquired in 2011. Others include RG7741 it picked up from Array BioPharma and IL-13-IL-17 bispecific RG7990 that it licensed from NovImmune . RG6069 was also dropped. It was being investigated for fibrosis. RG7155 was being evaluated with Tecentriq in solid tumors. RG7990 was being studied in asthma. RG6029 was being developed for pain. RG7741 was being studied in solid tumors. RG7155 was being evaluated with secrelumab in solid tumors. The company noted that for the year-to-date, 90 percent of growth was driven by new products. That includes sales of Ocrevus, which is prescribed for two types of multiple sclerosis, and cancer drugs Perjeta, Alecensa and Tecentriq. These offset lower sales of MabThera/Rituxan and Tarceva. In the U.S., sales were driven by Ocrevus, Herceptin and Perjeta. Ocrevus sales were driven by strong new patient demand, and Perjeta showed a whopping 30 percent increase of sales caused by approval for adjuvant treatment of patients with HER2-positive early breast cancer at high risk of recurrence. The company also reported it’s been a good year for new approvals, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approving Hemlibra for routine prophylaxis to prevent or reduce bleeding episodes in patients with hemophilia A without factor VIII inhibitors. Also, the FDA approved single-dose prefilled syringes for Xolair for allergic asthma and chronic idiopathic urticaria (CIU). And the FDA approved Actremra for active systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis in patients two years or older.

October 12, 2015 By Mark Terry , BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff Analysts and investors love to speculate on big mergers and acquisitions, but rumors that Novartis AG and Roche might merge into a huge European-based drug company have been waved away by company executives. Clearly a Roche - NVS merger is of interest to analysts, because this isn’t the first time the subject has come up, nor is it the first time the company executives have said it won’t happen. Way back in March 2014, Reuters ran a story in which outgoing Roche Chairman, Franz Humer , denied any interest in a merger. When asked if he wanted the two companies to stay independent, Joerg Reinhardt , chairman of Novartis said, “Absolutely.” And analysts are asking again. At least part of the reason the subject comes up is that Novartis already owns a 33 percent stake in Roche Holding AG . “On paper, you can generate a lot of value, that is true,” Reinhardt told Bilanz Business Talk in a recent interview. “Our philosophy is, we want to grow organically.” Novartis ’s Reinhardt, says, “I would from our perspective, certainly for the foreseeable future, rule out” any large takeovers. In addition, both companies are near each other, in the city of Basel, Switzerland. And they are, obviously, competitors. Not that Novartis ’s strategy is always that easy to understand. In August the company announced it was acquiring the remaining rights to Ofatumumab from UK-based GlaxoSmithKline for more than $1 billion. The company had bought the rights to the drug earlier for oncology, which is marketed as Arzerra. The new deal was for the rights to develop and market it for multiple sclerosis (MS). The biggest competitor for the drug is Roche ’s ocrelizumab. If Roche ’s ocrelizumab is approved for MS in 2016, it would be on the market in 2017. If Novartis manages to develop Ofatumumab for MS, it probably wouldn’t be on the market until 2019. “It’s a joke,” said Fabian Wenner , an analyst at Kepler Cheuvreux in Zurich in an interview with Bloomberg Business. “Patients either want better convenience than the old drugs or they want better efficacy, and Ofatumumab is offering neither of those things. The chances of this being successful in MS and generating any sales are zero on my view.” It’s possible that Novartis is looking at “other auto-immune conditions,” for the drug and believes it can expand the uses for the drug beyond cancer and MS, such as systemic lupus erythematosis, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, and type 1 diabetes. Novartis also announced in January a big three-part deal with GSK . In that deal, GSK acquired Novartis ’s vaccine business, except the influenza vaccines, and created a consumer healthcare joint venture. It sold off its oncology portfolio and related research and development activities to Novartis, as well as the rights to two pipeline AKT inhibitors. Roche , for its part, is not known for large acquisitions with the exception of its 2009 acquisition of Genentech for $46.9 billion. It has made numerous smaller acquisitions, such as Seragon Pharmaceuticals in 2014 for $725 million, and Santaris Pharma for about $250 million. Just last week the company acquired San Francisco-based Adheron Therapeutics for up to $580 million. In a September interview with Reuters, Severin Schwann , chief executive officer of Roche , said he felt biotechnology was in a “bubble,” which drove up the prices of medium-sized companies. He think the bubble will burst. Although this concern hasn’t kept the company from buying smaller companies, he said of bigger deals, “For us, none of them make sense and when I see this all the time, I am worried that valuations are too high.”