The companies have announced the impending closures of their respective businesses. Histogen will lay off most of its employees by the end of September. Fresh Tracks will do so by early October.
Pictured: Closed sign being flipped over/iStock, StockSeller_ukr
Colorado-based pharma Fresh Tracks announced Tuesday that its board of directors had unanimously agreed to dissolve the company and liquidate its assets, while California biotech Histogen on Monday also announced that it was dissolving and liquidating its business.
Fresh Tracks will discontinue all its clinical and preclinical development programs as well as lay off “most employees,” which is set to happen by early October 2023, according to the company’s announcement.
The news comes after the company’s search for potential strategic alternatives to save its business had turned up empty. However, Fresh Tracks will retain consultants, advisors and certain employees who are involved in the company’s dissolution. The company’s liquidation is still pending final approval from its shareholders.
A day before Fresh Tracks announced its closure plans, San Diego-based Histogen said that it was dissolving and liquidating its business. Like its Colorado counterpart, Histogen has opted to discontinue all clinical development programs and has drastically slimmed down its workforce as part of its dissolution plan. Most employees will be laid off by the end of September 2023, according to the company’s announcement.
Fresh Tracks was launched in September 2022 from a sweeping rebranding of Brickell Biotech. At the time, former CEO Robert Brown said that the company’s new name reflects the company’s mission “to develop groundbreaking, novel therapies that have the potential to restore immune balance.” Brown retired in January 2023 and was succeeded by Andew Sklawer.
The company has since advanced a pipeline of immunology assets, including the DYRK1A inhibitor FRTX-02, which was in Phase I assessments for atopic dermatitis and was also being proposed for rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes. The company also owned an oral STING inhibitor, dubbed FRTX-10, which was in preclinical development for systemic lupus erythematosus, dermatomyositis and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis.
In its most recent earnings report, posted August 2023, Fresh Tracks announced that it had “paused substantially all of its research and development activities in order to conserve capital resources.” In a previous earnings call soon after its rebrand, the company indicated that it was looking at strategic options including financing, merger or reverse merger, business combination or the sale of part of the company.
Under its plan of dissolution, Histogen is considering selling off its pipeline assets—the proceeds from which would be distributed to stockholders along with its remaining cash. The proposed dissolution is still pending approval from the company’s stockholders, for which it expects to convene a special meeting in the fourth quarter of this year.
Prior to the announcement, Histogen was advancing its experimental bacterial skin infection treatment emricasan. It had received the FDA’s go-ahead in March 2023 to conduct clinical trials for the candidate.
Tristan Manalac is an independent science writer based in Metro Manila, Philippines. He can be reached at tristan@tristanmanalac.com or tristan.manalac@biospace.com.
