Thanks in part to in­ter­est from Big Phar­ma play­ers like Bay­er and No­var­tis over the last decade, there’s been no short­age in cash for new com­pa­nies look­ing to slay tu­mor cells with tar­get­ed ra­dioiso­topes. Now a transpa­cif­ic up­start has hooked $75 mil­lion to bring the in­creas­ing­ly pop­u­lar drugs to Chi­na.

Ablaze Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals emerged from stealth on Mon­day with a Vi­vo Cap­i­tal and Ad­van­Tech Cap­i­tal-led Se­ries A round and a li­cens­ing pact with Ver­sant-backed Rayze­Bio. The goal? In­tro­duce tar­get­ed ra­dio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ther­a­pies (TRTs) to the Chi­nese mar­ket.

“Tar­get­ed ra­dio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ther­a­pies rep­re­sent the next foun­da­tion­al modal­i­ty to treat can­cer,” Ken Song, Rayze­Bio CEO and chair­man of the board at Ablaze, said in a state­ment. “In form­ing Ablaze, we re­al­ized to be suc­cess­ful, it was crit­i­cal to have a com­pa­ny fo­cused on the Chi­na mar­ket and fo­cused on ra­dio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals.”

Un­like ra­di­a­tion ther­a­py, which is ad­min­is­tered by an ex­ter­nal beam of high-en­er­gy rays, ra­dio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals de­liv­er ra­dioiso­topes to tu­mors via the blood­stream. Song told End­points News back in June that the over­all con­cept is sim­i­lar to that of an an­ti­body-drug con­ju­gate. You start with a binder, a link­er and a pay­load — ex­cept in­stead of an an­ti­body, there are small­er pep­tides, and in­stead of a chemother­a­peu­tic pay­load, there’s a ra­dioac­tive par­ti­cle which is “many or­ders of mag­ni­tude” more po­tent. By switch­ing ra­dioiso­topes, sci­en­tists can al­so per­form imag­ing di­ag­no­sis, Ablaze says.

Bay­er was one of the ear­ly en­trants in this space, with an Al­ge­ta-part­nered ra­dionu­clide ther­a­py that was shown to boost the over­all sur­vival of cas­tra­tion-re­sis­tant prostate can­cer pa­tients with symp­to­matic bone metas­tases. Bay­er snapped up Al­ge­ta just be­fore the drug, Xofi­go, was ap­proved by the FDA. Mean­while, No­var­tis se­cured its place in the race through multi­bil­lion-dol­lar buy­outs of Ad­vanced Ac­cel­er­a­tor Ap­pli­ca­tions and En­do­cyte, giv­ing it FDA-ap­proved Lu­tathera among oth­er pro­grams.

Alex Qiao

Then there are the small­er play­ers, like San Diego-based Rayze­Bio, MPM-found­ed Ak­tis On­col­o­gy, and now Ablaze, which has lo­ca­tions in both Shang­hai and San Diego. CEO Alex Qiao says Ablaze is al­ready in the clin­ic, though he of­fered few de­tails on the com­pa­ny’s pro­grams. In ad­di­tion to the Rayze­Bio pro­grams, the com­pa­ny has one part­nered pro­gram with an aca­d­e­m­ic in­sti­tu­tion, he said.

The Se­ries A — which al­so saw par­tic­i­pa­tion from RAYZ In­vest­ments, Nan Fung Life Sci­ences, Piv­otal bioVen­ture Part­ners Chi­na, ven­Bio Part­ners, Sam­sara Bio­Cap­i­tal and Ven­rock Health­care Cap­i­tal Part­ners — will be used to es­tab­lish a pipeline of TRTs for the treat­ment of sol­id tu­mors, ex­pand the team, and build up in­fra­struc­ture, ac­cord­ing to Qiao.

It’s al­so ex­plor­ing oth­er part­ner­ships, the CEO said. But for now, in­vestors are con­fi­dent the com­pa­ny will be able to break in­to the mar­ket over­seas.

“TRT is an emerg­ing field that has al­ready demon­strat­ed tremen­dous clin­i­cal ef­fi­ca­cy in treat­ing can­cer world­wide,” Hong­bo Lu, man­ag­ing part­ner of Vi­vo Cap­i­tal, said in a state­ment.

Over the past three years, Endpoints News has spotlighted 60 women who have blazed trails and supercharged R&D across the biopharma world. And judging from the response we’ve received, to both our special reports and live events, telling their stories — including any obstacles they may have had to overcome — has inspired our readers in many different ways.

But change takes time, and the fact remains that women are still underrepresented at the upper ranks of the drug-making world.

Most of the gene therapy world centers around viral vectors, but a few biotechs have sprung up in recent years to try and avoid the safety issues that can come with adeno-associated viruses.

A new biotech has emerged to straddle somewhere “close to the middle,” in the words of Alex Mayweg, Versant managing director and board member of the incubator’s latest startup, Vector BioPharma.

Pfizer is launching its second-ever rebate program, this time for Panzyga, its treatment for a rare neurological disease of the peripheral nerves.

The program began last month, according to STAT which first reported the news, and offers a refund of out-of-pocket costs for patients who must discontinue their course before the fifth treatment for “clinical reasons.”

Panzyga was approved back in 2018 to treat primary immunodeficiency (PI) in patients two years and older and chronic immune thrombocytopenia (cITP) in adults. It has since picked up an indication in chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), a condition that’s characterized by weakness of the arms or legs, tingling or numbness, and a loss of deep tendon reflexes, according to the NIH.

Endo International will likely be the next pharma company to file for bankruptcy under a mountain of opioid lawsuits.

The Dublin, Ireland-based company revealed in its Q2 results on Tuesday that it’s in talks with first lien creditors, and that “these negotiations will likely result in a pre-arranged filing under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code by Endo International plc and substantially all of its subsidiaries, which could occur imminently.”