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.

The first time San Diego biotech Ambrx tried to go public in 2014, they failed and the company’s board switched to a radically different strategy: They sold themselves for an undisclosed amount to a syndicate of Chinese investors and pharma companies.

Now, after 5 quiet years, that syndicate has raised a mountain of cash and indicated they’ll soon make another bid to go public.

Earlier this month, Ambrx raised $200 million in what they billed as a crossover round financed by Fidelity, BlackRock, Cormorant Asset Management, HBM Healthcare Investments, Invus, Adage Capital Partners and Suvretta Capital Management. It’s the largest amount they’ve ever raised and, according to Crunchbase figures, more than doubles the total amount of VC capital collected since their launch 17 years ago.

Two biotechs said they got turned away by the FDA on Wednesday, in part due to pandemic-related travel restrictions.

North Carolina-based Liquidia Technologies was handed a CRL for its lead pulmonary arterial hypertension drug, citing the need for more CMC data and on-site pre-approval inspections, which the FDA hasn’t been able to conduct due to travel restrictions. The agency also deferred its decision on Revance Therapeutics’ BLA for its frown line treatment, because it needs to inspect the company’s northern California manufacturing facility. The action, Revance emphasized, was not a CRL.

Three months after Reata Pharmaceuticals suggested its Friedreich’s ataxia program omaveloxolone could be delayed, the company revealed that is indeed going to be the case.

Reata $RETA shares took a nosedive Wednesday after the biotech revealed that the FDA said supplemental data for its pivotal trial did not strengthen the case for approval. As a result, the drug is likely to need another study before the FDA takes up the case.

→ San Diego protein degradation startup Vividion Therapeutics has made a change at the top with Jeffrey Hatfield taking the helm as CEO, replacing Diego Miralles six months after Roche forked over $135 million to collaborate with Vividion on their small molecule degraders. Hatfield is chairman of the board at miRagen Therapeutics and previously held the CEO job at Zafgen and Vitae Pharmaceuticals. He also had a series of leadership roles at Bristol Myers Squibb from 1996-2004, including SVP, immunology and virology divisions.

When Shanghai’s STAR board began opening its doors to biotech, it was considered not just a rival to Nasdaq but also the stock exchange in Hong Kong. Those perceptions may take an amicable turn as China expands a mutual access program with the city.

The changes mean investors in mainland China will be able to own Hong Kong biotech chapter stocks, while those in Hong Kong — a much more internationally connected group — would have access to those listed on STAR. In effect, it turns the Shanghai market into a globally accessible exchange overnight while also broadening a key source of revenue for HKEX.