A 300-em­ploy­ee Dan­ish biotech is evolv­ing be­yond its obe­si­ty part­ner­ships and look­ing to adopt an in­cu­ba­tion mod­el that has served Roivant Sci­ences quite well over the years.

Gubra, the 18-year-old biotech that plant­ed the seed for Ab­b­Vie's for­ay in­to obe­si­ty last year, has cre­at­ed a busi­ness wing to fo­cus on cre­at­ing new as­set-cen­tric com­pa­nies around sci­ence from oth­er bio­phar­mas or aca­d­e­mics.

The unit, called Gubra Ven­tures, will com­ple­ment the biotech's two oth­er groups: an in­ter­nal R&D team that has churned out mul­ti­ple po­ten­tial block­buster obe­si­ty drugs, and a con­tract re­search or­ga­ni­za­tion that helps dri­ve prof­it.

The goal is to form in­de­pen­dent biotechs but build them with a "cen­tral­ized en­gine," Zoë John­son, the new­ly in­stalled head of Gubra Ven­tures, said in an in­ter­view.

Ul­tragenyx said its gene ther­a­py can­di­date for a rare meta­bol­ic dis­ease has hit one of two pri­ma­ry end­points in a late-stage study.

The drug is be­ing test­ed in 37 peo­ple with or­nithine tran­scar­bamy­lase de­fi­cien­cy, a rare ge­net­ic dis­ease. Pa­tients have a mu­ta­tion in the OTC gene which, in healthy peo­ple, makes an en­zyme that turns am­mo­nia in­to urea for ex­cre­tion through urine. But in peo­ple with the mu­ta­tion, the com­plete or par­tial lack of the en­zyme leads to the buildup of am­mo­nia in the blood to dan­ger­ous and po­ten­tial­ly fa­tal lev­els.

Ul­tragenyx's ther­a­py, called DTX301, de­liv­ers a func­tion­al copy of the OTC gene. In the Phase 3 tri­al, it led to an 18% re­duc­tion in 24-hour plas­ma am­mo­nia com­pared with place­bo at 36 weeks, the com­pa­ny said in a press re­lease. Ul­tragenyx called the re­sult “sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant and clin­i­cal­ly mean­ing­ful” (p = 0.018).

A few years ago, the on­col­o­gy world won­dered if it had found its next big break­through: a third ma­jor check­point in­hibitor be­yond PD-1 and CT­LA-4.

The FDA in 2022 ap­proved Bris­tol My­ers Squib­b's LAG-3-tar­get­ing Op­du­alag. Many drug­mak­ers hoped that would be the start of a new class of can­cer im­munother­a­py.