Drug de­vel­op­ment is a glob­al busi­ness, but when it comes to rais­ing ven­ture cash, star­tups in Eu­rope and the US are of­ten op­er­at­ing on com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent scales.

Con­sid­er Alen­tis Ther­a­peu­tics, a biotech in­cu­bat­ed in Basel, Switzer­land that says it has found the “mas­ter switch” for a num­ber of ad­vanced liv­er dis­eases, from fi­bro­sis due to NASH to he­pa­to­cel­lu­lar car­ci­no­ma. The Se­ries A grant to­tal: $13.2 mil­lion (CHF 13.5 mil­lion).

Thomas Baumert

Founder Thomas Baumert was in Boston a few days be­fore the an­nounce­ment. With this kind of pro­file, he re­calls peo­ple telling him, “we prob­a­bly could eas­i­ly get 50 mil­lion in the Unit­ed States.”

But Baumert, whose decade-long re­search at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Stras­bourg formed the foun­da­tion of Alen­tis, is hap­py where he is. Be­tween his sci­en­tif­ic base in the French city and Basel, his small team of 4 have “the best of both worlds,” with ac­cess to both cut­ting edge trans­la­tion­al sci­ence and “fan­tas­tic in­fra­struc­ture” for run­ning a biotech busi­ness. Not to men­tion the cal­iber of the sci­en­tif­ic ad­vis­ers and ser­vice providers they reg­u­lar­ly work with, many of whom are No­var­tis or Roche alums.

Markus Ew­ert

CEO Markus Ew­ert — ex-No­var­tis staffer and for­mer CBO of Abl­ynx — adds that the cur­rent funds should last a cou­ple of years, tak­ing Alen­tis’s lead mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body through CMC de­vel­op­ment and some tox stud­ies.

Af­ter that, though, they will like­ly need $30 mil­lion to $35 mil­lion more in or­der to car­ry out sol­id clin­i­cal stud­ies. Part­ners with deep­er pock­ets are wel­come to pick up the tab af­ter proof-of-con­cept.

All the while, Alen­tis will con­tin­ue op­ti­miz­ing some oth­er com­pounds dis­cov­ered on its plat­form — a spe­cial cell cul­ture mod­el that cap­tures the cell cir­cuits and gene ex­pres­sion of pa­tients with late-stage liv­er dis­ease in a way that oth­ers haven’t been able to, ac­cord­ing to Bau­rmert — to beef up the pipeline. They are al­so in talks with big­ger play­ers who are in­ter­est­ed in uti­liz­ing the plat­form tech on their own projects, Ew­ert says.

He plans to dou­ble the head­count at the com­pa­ny, but in­tends to keep the full-time team rel­a­tive­ly small.

Bio­Med­Part­ners and BB Pure­os Bioven­tures — both Swiss VC funds — co-led the round and each sends a rep­re­sen­ta­tive to the board. They were joined by BPI France (al­so join­ing the board), Schroder Ad­veq and the Ger­man High-Tech Grün­der­fonds.

An increase in demand of up to 79% for clinical trials in China has prompted Novotech the Asia-Pacific CRO to rapidly expand the China team, appointing expert local clinical executives to their Shanghai and Hong Kong offices. The company is planning to expand their team by 30% over the next quarter.

Novotech China has seen considerable demand recently which is borne out by research from GlobalData:
A global migration of clinical research is occurring from high-income countries to low and middle-income countries with emerging economies. Over the period 2017 to 2018, for example, the number of clinical trial sites opened by biotech companies in Asia-Pacific increased by 35% compared to 8% in the rest of the world, with growth as high as 79% in China.
Novotech CEO Dr John Moller said China offers the largest population in the world, rapid economic growth, and an increasing willingness by government to invest in research and development.
Novotech’s 23 years of experience working in the region means we are the ideal CRO partner for USA biotechs wanting to tap the research expertise and opportunities that China offers.
There are over 22,000 active investigators in Greater China, with about 5,000 investigators with experience on at least 3 studies (source GlobalData).

Score one for Hal Barron and the new R&D team steering GlaxoSmithKline’s pipeline.

The pharma giant reported this morning that its recently acquired PARP, Zejula (niraparib), hit the primary endpoint on progression-free survival in a frontline maintenance setting for women suffering ovarian cancer — following chemo and regardless of their BRCA status.

GSK bet $5 billion on the Tesaro buyout primarily to get this drug, drawing the shaking heads of biopharma. Why pay a big premium for a drug like this when AstraZeneca was going from strength to strength with Lynparza, ran the argument, having won a hugely important accelerated approval to jump out ahead — way ahead — of the rest of the PARP players? Lynparza — now co-owned by a powerhouse cancer team at Merck — won the first approval in frontline maintenance in ovarian cancer.

→ An ever-ambitious Alkermes $ALKS team plans to add bipolar I disorder to its list of conditions for ALKS-3831, which it plans to pitch to the FDA in Q4. Alkermes says they were persuaded to add bipolar I disorder after a pre-NDA meeting with the agency, which came about 7 months after the biotech reported positive data for schizophrenia. The drug is a combo using olanzapine/samidorphan, which they hope will be shown to be as effective as olanzapine without the substantial increase in the risk of weight gain.

Peter Kolchinsky and Raj Shah have another $300 million-plus to play with on the biotech venture side of their investment business. 

The two announced Monday morning that they’ve put together their first pure-play venture fund at RA Capital Management, which has been known to bet on just about every angle in healthcare investing — from rounds to follow-on investments at public companies. This new fund of theirs arrives well into a go-go era of new startup financing, with a particular focus on building new biotechs.

Billing itself as the first AI biotech with programs in the clinic, Salt Lake City-based Recursion now has a $121 million bankroll to start gathering human data to see if it’s on the right track. 

“We’re trying to build this discovery engine,” Recursion CEO Chris Gibson tells me ahead of the C round news. “We now have the first two programs in the clinic.” And that, he adds, qualifies as a first for any AI establishment “that actually have something in the clinic.”

The FDA has just fired its latest salvo at the SGLT class of diabetes drugs, blowing up some commercial opportunity at AstraZeneca as part of the collateral damage.

The pharma giant reported early Monday that the FDA has rejected its blockbuster drug Farxiga for Type 1 diabetes that can’t be controlled by insulin. And while the pharma giant maintained its usual grim silence in the face of a setback, this one should be easy to interpret.