A trans-At­lantic biotech with one foot in Cam­bridge, UK and an­oth­er plant­ed in Cam­bridge, MA has raised close to $52 mil­lion as it looks to beef up its staff and steer a range of its unique­ly de­signed drug con­ju­gates in­to the clin­ic.

Bi­cy­cle Ther­a­peu­tics won back­ing from a long list of mar­quee in­vestors: Ver­tex Ven­tures led the round with help from new in­vestors Cam­bridge In­no­va­tion Cap­i­tal and Christophe West­phal’s Long­wood Fund. Bi­cy­cle’s ex­ist­ing in­vestors – No­var­tis Ven­ture Fund, Glax­o­SmithK­line’s SROne, SVLS and At­las Ven­ture — all came back for the B round.

Their mon­ey will go in­to ear­ly-stage work on drugs like BT1718 — which tar­gets Mem­brane Type 1 Ma­trix Met­al­lo­pro­teinase, or MT1- MTP, ex­pressed on tu­mor cells. These drugs are sup­posed to drop a tox­ic pay­load right on tar­get — a fa­mil­iar con­cept that Bi­cy­cle has a fresh twist on.

Bi­cy­cle’s pep­tide plat­form looks to cre­ate a new class of ther­a­peu­tic that com­bines some of the best as­pects of dif­fer­ent kinds of treat­ments. They want the speci­fici­ty of an an­ti­body, the pen­e­tra­tion of a small mol­e­cule in tu­mors and an ad­justable half-life to make them ex­treme­ly po­tent for a brief pe­ri­od of time — lay­ing waste to tu­mor cells be­fore be­ing rapid­ly cleared from the body.

Kevin Lee

That’s a tall or­der. But Bi­cy­cle didn’t get rolling yes­ter­day, ei­ther. CEO Kevin Lee, a Pfiz­er vet, came on board in 2015, a year af­ter a $32 mil­lion A round and 6 years af­ter the com­pa­ny got start­ed.

“Bi­cy­cle was giv­en the lux­u­ry of time to de­vel­op the plat­form,” Lee tells me. And now it has more mon­ey to en­joy the lux­u­ry of tak­ing sev­er­al ini­tial shots on goal at one time.

“We don’t want the com­pa­ny to live and die on one mol­e­cule,” says Lee, so the plan is to take a num­ber of their mol­e­cules in­to the clin­ic — just how many and how long a run­way they’ll have is yet to be de­cid­ed.

At the same time, there’s more room on the plat­form for ad­di­tion­al non-can­cer part­ner­ships like the one it struck with As­traZeneca on res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­eases last year, with a tal­ly of up­front plus mile­stones that range around the $1 bil­lion mark.

There will al­so be a big­ger staff. Lee says he plans to in­crease the size of the can­cer re­search crew and busi­ness de­vel­op­ment team in Cam­bridge, MA, adding to the Amer­i­can ac­cent of what has been a pri­mar­i­ly British biotech.

Fur­ther down the road Lee would like to con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ties of an IPO, but there’s a lot of re­search work to be done be­fore any­one starts cal­cu­lat­ing the range on a share price.

Digital therapeutics company Better Therapeutics announced on Thursday that it’s cutting 35% of its staff as it awaits FDA clearance for its first product.

The company, which launched eight years ago, is one of a growing group of companies seeking a digital alternative to traditional medicine. The space saw a record $7.5 billion in investments in 2021, according to Chris Dokomajilar at DealForma, with uses spanning ADHD, PTSD and other indications. However, private insurers have been slow to hop on board.

The FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence has been a bright spot within the agency in terms of speeding new treatments to patients. That flexibility was on full display this morning as FDA released new draft guidance spelling out exactly how oncology drug developers can fulfill both the accelerated and full approval’s requirements with just a single randomized controlled trial.

While Congress recently passed legislation that will allow FDA to require confirmatory trials to be recruiting and ongoing prior to granting an accelerated approval, the agency is now making clear that the initial trial used to win the AA, if designed appropriately, can also serve as the trial for converting the accelerated approval into a full approval.