New Jersey-based biotech, Talawar Therapeutics and JATT II Acquisition have joined forces through a definitive business combination agreement – creating a new biotech that’s aiming to disrupt the crowded atopic dermatitis (AD) market ruled by Sanofi and Regeneron’s Dupixent (dupilumab).
Operating under the name Talawar Therapeutics, the company will make its debut on the Nasdaq under the ticker ‘TLWR’ following a private investment in public equity (PIPE) raise, which saw it secure $225m from big names like founding investor Access Biotechnology and contributors Bain Capital Life Sciences and RA Capital Management to progress a range of immunology therapeutics to the clinic.
This fresh capital, in combination with the $60m held in a trust account by JATT II – provided there are no redemptions from the company’s public shareholders – will allow Talawar to push its novel IL-13/IL-18 bispecific antibody, TALA-125, through a Phase IIb proof-of-concept trial, with a readout expected in the second half of 2028.
According to the biotech’s CEO, Marc Schegerin, TALA-125 holds the potential to “shatter the current monotherapy efficacy plateau by combining two clinically validated, complementary mechanisms in a single bispecific molecule”. Talawar expects the drug to enter the clinic in the first quarter of 2027, with a first interim data readout slated for the fourth quarter.
On top of its efforts with TALA-125, Talawar is developing TALA-307 and TALA-711, two discovery-phase immunology programmes.
If the transaction closes as expected in the second half of 2026, Talawar will become the first to spin out of British biotech builder Khanda Therapeutics, which aims to create companies that “advance orthogonal biology-based approaches”, according to its website. The term ‘orthogonal’ is used to describe when two or more biological systems that work independently of each other are harnessed for therapeutic benefit.
Unmet opportunities remain in the crowded AD space
As the newly formed Talawar makes its debut on public markets, Access Biotechnology managing director and Talawar board chair, Dan Becker, notes that AD remains one of the largest therapeutic markets in the immunology and inflammatory space.
A report from GlobalData, the parent company of Pharmaceutical Technology, backs Becker's take, estimating that sales across the seven major markets (7MM: the US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and Japan) in AD will reach $22.4bn in 2033, prompted by a shift away from broad-acting immunomodulatory agents towards more targeted therapeutic options.
Despite the explosion in options for patients with AD, Becker claims that monotherapies have “consistently fallen short for patients”.
By marrying two validated, orthogonal pathways in a single molecule, Becker believes that TALA-125 can “break through the efficacy ceiling” created by monotherapies – creating an opportunity he says could “redefine what’s possible for patients living with immunological and inflammatory disorders”.
However, Talawar will face fierce competition in the AD space from blockbuster marketed assets like Dupixent and AbbVie’s Rinvoq (upadacitinib), which have established a significant market share in this indication since their respective launches.
The biotech may also have to contend with drugs currently in clinical development for AD. According to GlobalData’s Pharmaceutical Intelligence Center, there are currently more than 200 active clinical trials involving investigational AD drugs, of which more than one-fifth are currently in Phase III trials.
