Tri­alSpark, one of sev­er­al com­pa­nies launched specif­i­cal­ly to ad­dress the “mourn­ful” cost of clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment, now has $156 mil­lion more to work with — and with it, CEO Ben­jamine Liu has big plans to move in­to drug de­vel­op­ment.

Lin­hao Zhang

The biotech uni­corn — val­ued at more than $1 bil­lion — un­veiled a hefty Se­ries C round on Thurs­day, led by tech in­vestors Sam Alt­man and Lachy Groom. Liu says he’ll use those funds to build a pipeline, ei­ther by ac­quir­ing or part­ner­ing on as­sets. The rest will go to­ward ex­pand­ing the New York-based team, and in­vest­ing in oth­er com­pa­nies with promis­ing can­di­dates.

The goal is to build a “tech com­pa­ny that’s do­ing bio­phar­ma, not a bio­phar­ma com­pa­ny do­ing tech,” Alt­man told Bloomberg. 

Tri­alSpark was launched in 2016 by Liu, a Yale and Ox­ford-trained com­pu­ta­tion­al bi­ol­o­gist, and CTO Lin­hao Zhang, a Sales­force and Os­car Health vet­er­an. A JA­MA study de­ter­mined that around that time, the me­di­an cost of a clin­i­cal tri­al was around $19 mil­lion, with the prici­est tri­als cost­ing as much as $345 mil­lion.

Since its launch, Tri­alSpark has built a clin­i­cal tri­al plat­form that us­es soft­ware to help tri­al sites man­age stud­ies and col­lect da­ta. In 2019, the com­pa­ny joined forces with 23andMe, in the hopes of us­ing its ex­ten­sive data­base and re­search plat­form to speed up the pa­tient re­cruit­ment process.

“Tri­alSpark has al­ready made sig­nif­i­cant ef­forts to­ward ex­pand­ing ac­cess to clin­i­cal tri­als by cre­at­ing sites where pa­tients live and with doc­tors they al­ready see. With 23andMe we can em­pow­er even more pa­tients to ac­cess clin­i­cal tri­als at their lo­cal doc­tor’s of­fice,” Liu said at the time, adding that some da­ta and end­points could be cap­tured with wear­able tech­nol­o­gy, dig­i­tal ther­a­peu­tics, or at-home ge­net­ic test­ing with 23andMe.

The com­pa­ny claims it can en­roll pa­tients near­ly twice as fast as tra­di­tion­al ap­proach­es, and shrink de­vel­op­ment time­lines by 50%.

Michael Moritz

While it re­mains un­clear what tar­gets Tri­alSpark is look­ing to pur­sue in-house, the com­pa­ny says it has an eye for can­di­dates that would “sit on shelves due to the pro­hib­i­tive cost and du­ra­tion of tra­di­tion­al clin­i­cal tri­als.”

A slate of new and old in­vestors chipped in­to the lat­est round, in­clud­ing Se­quoia Cap­i­tal, Thrive Cap­i­tal, Cas­din Cap­i­tal, Drag­oneer, Sec­tion 32, John Do­err, Spark Cap­i­tal, Fe­li­cis Ven­tures, Sound Ven­tures and Ar­row­mark, among oth­er un­named in­vestors.

“When we first met, Ben­jamine was clear about the jour­ney he want­ed to em­bark up­on,” Se­quoia Cap­i­tal’s Michael Moritz said in a state­ment. “Noth­ing has changed. Tri­alSpark has scaled the foothills and the as­sault on the sum­mit has be­gun.”

Fenlai Tan still gets chills thinking about the darkest day of his life.

Three out of eight lung cancer patients who received a tyrosine kinase inhibitor developed by his company, Betta Pharma, died in the span of a month. Tan, the chief medical officer, was summoned to Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where the head of the clinical trial department told him that the trial investigators would be conducting an autopsy to see if the patients had died of the disease — they were all very sick by the time they enrolled — or of interstitial lung disease, a deadly side effect tied to the TKI class that’s been reported in Japan.

BioNTech’s first mRNA-based vaccine site in Africa will call Rwanda home, and construction is set to start in mid-2022, the company announced Tuesday at a public health forum.

The German company signed a memorandum of understanding, after a meeting between Rwanda’s Minister of Health, Daniel Ngamije, Senegal’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Aïssata Tall Sall, and senior BioNTech officials. Construction plans have been finalized, and assets have been ordered. The agreement will help bring end-to-end manufacturing to Africa, and as many as several hundred million doses of vaccines per year, though initial production will be more modest.

Treg cells have been getting more and more attention recently among autoimmune specialists. There’s been Jeff Bluestone’s Sonoma, the $157 million launch of GentiBio this summer and Egle Therapeutics — which launched just last week — to name a few.

Now, there’s a new Treg player jumping in that wants to distinguish itself in the market: Mozart Therapeutics. Today, the biotech is emerging from stealth in its official debut with a $55 million Series A — with a bunch of A-list Big Pharma names on board a syndicate led by ARCH.