Bri­an Good­man, Patrick Baeuer­le and Todd Fo­ley weren’t ex­act­ly look­ing to start a ra­dio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals com­pa­ny.

Rather, the team at MPM Cap­i­tal — which had been known for its will­ing­ness to seed and in­cu­bate new ideas for bat­tling can­cer — was search­ing for tech­nolo­gies that could con­fer “CAR-T like ef­fi­ca­cy” in sol­id tu­mors. They went through an­ti­body-drug con­ju­gates, cell ther­a­pies and T cell en­gagers but very quick­ly got hooked on some­thing else: al­pha emit­ting par­ti­cles.

It was 2019, and in­ter­est in the space was bub­bling as No­var­tis claimed a lead with the ac­qui­si­tion of both Ad­vanced Ac­cel­er­a­tor Ap­pli­ca­tions and En­do­cyte while small­er play­ers like Fu­sion Phar­ma and Clo­vis were an­gling for en­try. Specif­i­cal­ly, the MPM VCs had their eyes on al­pha emit­ting par­ti­cles: a pay­load that’s 1,000 times as po­tent as the be­ta emit­ters used in cur­rent­ly ap­proved ra­dio­ther­a­pies.

The time seemed ripe for ra­dio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals to be­come more main­stream, they de­cid­ed, with mon­ey be­ing poured in­to all steps of the val­ue chain, in­clud­ing sup­pli­ers of ra­dioiso­topes and con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ers. But there is a need for a new kind of phar­ma­col­o­gy — find­ing the right mol­e­cules that would take the ra­dioiso­topes where they need to be and keep them there. And that’s pre­cise­ly their goal with Ak­tis On­col­o­gy, which was for­mal­ized in 2020 and is now tak­ing the wraps off a $72 mil­lion launch round.

“We’re not alone,” said Matthew Ro­den, CEO of Ak­tis and ex­ec­u­tive part­ner at MPM. “There’s an ecosys­tem be­ing built at the mo­ment that’s go­ing to en­able the suc­cess of this field go­ing for­ward.”

Like Rayze­Bio — the Ver­sant- and ven­Bio-backed start­up that’s sim­i­lar­ly promis­ing a new breed of ra­dio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals — Ak­tis (the Greek root for ac­tini­um, the el­e­ment they’d be turn­ing to for the al­pha-emit­ting par­ti­cles) is keen about be­com­ing a plat­form play. Ro­den, an alum­nus of Bris­tol My­ers Squibb’s strat­e­gy unit who took up the post at the biotech soon af­ter join­ing MPM last sum­mer, is care­ful not to spill too many beans. But he is more ready to di­vulge what drew him to the project among oth­er port­fo­lio com­pa­nies he could’ve cho­sen from.

“There’s re­al­ly no good re­sis­tance mech­a­nism to al­pha emis­sions,” he told End­points News. “Al­pha par­ti­cles are ba­si­cal­ly a he­li­um atom that is dis­charged that cre­ates dou­ble strand breaks in DNA.”

Com­bined with the po­ten­cy, that means ra­dio­ther­a­pies can work with few­er con­straints and po­ten­tial­ly ad­dress tar­gets that es­cape oth­er modal­i­ties: You don’t need a thresh­old of anti­gen ex­pres­sion, or in­ter­nal­iza­tion, or im­mune cell ac­tiv­i­ty.

Plus, since you can the­o­ret­i­cal­ly swap out imag­ing iso­topes with ther­a­peu­tic iso­topes with ease, Ak­tis en­vi­sions a straight­for­ward path to the clin­ic once they can show — with the help of those imag­ing agents — dense ac­cu­mu­la­tion of the drug around the tu­mor but nowhere else.

Hav­ing looked at “count­less class­es of mol­e­cules,” Ro­den not­ed that Ak­tis’ in­ter­nal crew of 10 has worked with col­lab­o­ra­tors, ad­vi­sors and con­sul­tants (we’re go­ing to have to wait to find out who they are) to build a cou­ple of screen­ing plat­forms in par­al­lel to iden­ti­fy com­pounds to hit their se­lect­ed tar­gets. The com­pa­ny is head­quar­tered in Cam­bridge, MA with labs in Re­search Tri­an­gle Park, NC.

No­var­tis and Bris­tol My­ers Squibb are both back­ing the hunt, join­ing EcoR1 Cap­i­tal, Vi­da Ven­tures, Oc­ta­gon Cap­i­tal and TCG Crossover on the Se­ries A syn­di­cate.

Paul Feld­man, a Glax­o­SmithK­line vet who pre­vi­ous­ly co-found­ed a pep­tide-fo­cused com­pa­ny, is com­ing on board as CSO while Good­man from MPM is dou­bling as head of op­er­a­tions and cor­po­rate de­vel­op­ment.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”