Takeda shunts jewel of Shire takeover to new spinoff Oak Hill

Takeda keeps pumping out biotech spinoffs. Months after spawning HilleVax, the Japanese drugmaker has packed off another pair of midphase programs to seed a new rare disease player: Oak Hill Bio.

Massachusetts-based Oak Hill starts life with a pair of assets that made it as far as phase 2 before losing momentum amid Takeda’s large pipeline. The lead candidate is OHB-607, a recombinant human version of IGF-1 that Takeda hailed as one of the jewels of its $62 billion takeover of Shire in 2019. Back then, Takeda pitched the drug as a potential breakthrough in the prevention of the complications of premature births.