Business Roundup

Carbon3D, developer of a rapid 3-D printing process, has raised $100 million in a new funding round led by Google Ventures. The money will be used to further a photochemical printing process that a team led by University of North Carolina chemist Joseph DeSimone recently introduced at a TED conference in Vancouver.

K+S will supply Koch Fertilizer with nearly 500,000 metric tons per year of potash, representing a quarter of the output from a $3.1 billion mine K+S is constructing in Saskatchewan. The mine, set for completion by the end of 2017, is one of the targets of PotashCorp’s $8.7 billion K&S takeover attempt, which has thus far been rebuffed.

Novartis will pay $15 million to license AV-380, an antibody targeting growth differentiation factor 15, from Cambridge, Mass.-based Aveo Oncology. The antibody is a potential treatment for cachexia, or muscle wasting.

AbbVie is shelling out $350 million for United Therapeutics’ rare disease priority review voucher, which can be used to trim four months from FDA’s review of a new drug. United Therapeutics received the PRV upon the approval of its neuroblastoma treatment Unituxin. To date, four PRVs have changed hands, with AbbVie paying the most for the voucher.

Pfenex has signed a five-year, $143.5 million contract with a division of the Department of Health & Human Services for the development of Px563L, a mutant recombinant protective antigen anthrax vaccine. The firm claims its development program offers the potential to speed production of large amounts of stable recombinant vaccine.

La Jolla Pharmaceutical has signed an agreement with Vanderbilt University related to bone and other diseases. The agreement covers research and intellectual property around small-molecule kinase inhibitors designed to selectively block specific members of the bone morphogenetic protein type I receptor family.

Boehringer Ingelheim and Circuit Therapeutics have embarked on a second collaboration around Circuit’s optogenetics technology platform, a method of enabling temporal control of neural activity, this time to investigate treatments for obesity. The companies have been working since 2013 on treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders.

Biogen has joined with the ALS Association and Columbia University Medical Center to characterize patients in the U.S. with ALS. Through gene sequencing and clinical phenotyping of 1,500 people, the collaborators hope to develop more individually tailored therapies.