Richard Pe­ters

• Now that Mer­ri­mack Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals $MACK has auc­tioned off its sole com­mer­cial drug to Ipsen and fo­cused square­ly on a set of top clin­i­cal can­di­dates, the Cam­bridge, MA-based biotech has re­cruit­ed long­time in­dus­try vet­er­an Richard Pe­ters to take the helm. The Har­vard-trained physi­cian is com­ing over from Sanofi Gen­zyme, where he was SVP of glob­al rare dis­eases, a $3 bil­lion per year busi­ness. “With the sup­port of the Board of Di­rec­tors and the ex­pect­ed near-term in­fu­sion of cap­i­tal, sev­er­al com­pelling clin­i­cal as­sets are now primed to re­al­ize their full po­ten­tial,” said Pe­ters in a state­ment. “To­geth­er with the rest of the man­age­ment team, we plan on con­tin­u­ing to take sub­stan­tial steps to grow our ro­bust pipeline to its full po­ten­tial, with an eye to­ward ear­ly da­ta read-outs, to max­i­mize val­ue cre­ation for pa­tients and stock­hold­ers.”

• Gene­va-based Ob­sE­va has set the terms for its IPO. The women’s health biotech is plan­ning to sell 6.5 mil­lion shares at $14 to $16 apiece, the lat­est in a string of new of­fer­ings test­ing some chilly wa­ters. If suc­cess­ful, they would be about to raise about $97 mil­lion, look­ing for a mar­ket val­ue of around $444 mil­lion.

• Brae­burn Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, mean­while, is shoot­ing for around $150 mil­lion with an IPO de­signed to sell 7.7 mil­lion shares at a range of $18 to $21. In­sid­ers plan to take about $50 mil­lion of that.

• Ger­man­town, MD-based Psyadon re­port­ed that its Phase IIb study of a new drug for Tourette syn­drome “caused sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tions in the YGTSS-TTS at both two- and four weeks af­ter ini­ti­at­ing treat­ment….Ecopi­pam works by block­ing the dopamine D1 re­cep­tor which dif­fer­en­ti­ates it from any oth­er drug ei­ther on the mar­ket or cur­rent­ly in de­vel­op­ment. Since there hasn’t been a mech­a­nis­ti­cal­ly new drug for the treat­ment of Tourette’s in over 30 years, this could of­fer a bet­ter op­tion for peo­ple who suf­fer with the dis­ease,” said CEO Richard Chip­kin.