New start-up Oak Hill to advance ‘de-prioritized’ Takeda rare disease candidates

Two clinical programs Takeda had acquired via its 2018 takeout of Shire have now been housed in Oak Hill, a newly launched company that will advance them for preterm birth and autoimmune indications.

President and CFO Josh Distler told BioCentury that the founding executive team at Oak Hill Bio Inc. “spent about a year looking at de-prioritized pharma projects” within pharmas, hoping to move forward a worthwhile project that had stalled for strategic reasons. The neonatology asset, a complex of IGF-1 and IGFBP3 from Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. (Tokyo:4502; NYSE:TAK), was the first from the Japanese pharma to spark the team’s interest...