Zhi Hong

Al­most two years af­ter leav­ing GSK to launch Brii Bio with a whop­ping $260 mil­lion in fund­ing, Zhi Hong is see­ing the trans-Pa­cif­ic in­fec­tious dis­ease spe­cial­ist he set out to build take shape.

“Our pipeline is com­ing to­geth­er,” he told End­points News, with 12 part­nered as­sets plus some in­ter­nal pro­grams.

As its lat­est part­ner, AN2 Ther­a­peu­tics, comes in­to the lime­light for the first time with a $12 mil­lion seed round, so is Brii’s plans in the an­tibi­otics space. Brii has ob­tained Chi­na rights to AN2’s an­tibac­te­r­i­al tar­get­ing my­cobac­teri­um tu­ber­cu­lo­sis for mul­ti-drug re­sis­tant TB, which it says is in the clin­i­cal stage.

Brii has al­so joined the syn­di­cate along­side Moun­tain Group Part­ners, Ad­ju­vant Cap­i­tal and BioRock Ven­tures — an in­vest-and-li­cense ap­proach that was al­so seen in pre­vi­ous­ly an­nounced deals with Qpex Bio­phar­ma and Ar­ti­zan Bio­sciences.

“The trio of part­ner­ships has al­most ze­ro over­lap­ping when it comes to the use of an­tibi­otics,” Hong not­ed.

While Qpex’s port­fo­lio of an­tibi­otics is en­gi­neered to fight high­ly re­sis­tant, gram-neg­a­tive pathogens with “crit­i­cal needs” for treat­ment ac­cord­ing to the WHO, Ar­ti­zan boasts of a unique mech­a­nism by which it iden­ti­fies harm­ful bac­te­ria — then specif­i­cal­ly takes them out with­out the “col­lat­er­al dam­age of typ­i­cal an­tibi­otics,” Hong said.

While Brii waits for — and aids — its col­lab­o­ra­tors to pro­duce proof-of-con­cept da­ta, the biotech’s clin­i­cal team is fo­cused on ad­vanc­ing a po­ten­tial he­pati­tis B cure. Both came from deals an­nounced late last year.

Hav­ing re­cent­ly be­gun a Phase Ib/IIa study for the im­munother­a­py from VBI Vac­cines, they ex­pect to gar­ner ini­tial re­sults by the end of next year. Be­fore that they should hear back from Vir, George Scan­gos’ new­ly pub­lic start­up, on its own Phase I/II of the RNAi as­set.

That gives them about a year be­fore switch­ing fo­cus to an­tibi­otics and dou­ble the head­count to around 80 — 60 in Bei­jing, where it has built an R&D cen­ter, and 20 in Hong’s home base of Durham, North Car­oli­na.

“You’re not go­ing to go to Chi­na overnight,” he said. “Chi­na’s reg­u­la­to­ry process­es, though it’s im­proved, can take six to nine months. So that gives you some time to build up a team.”

In tar­get­ing in­fec­tious dis­ease, and es­sen­tial­ly swear­ing off on­col­o­gy, Hong is clear about eye­ing a field where vol­ume mat­ters, which can be huge in a coun­try like Chi­na. And there is at least one more dis­ease area — one as­so­ci­at­ed with an ex­pand­ing mid­dle class, ur­ban­iza­tion and an ag­ing pop­u­la­tion — that he says Brii will soon ink an­oth­er pact in.

“So we are mov­ing in­to one non-in­fec­tious dis­ease area, and that’s prob­a­bly it,” he said. “We don’t want to be too frag­ment­ed.”

A month after word first broke of the Trump Administration’s plan to rapidly accelerate the development and production of a Covid-19 vaccine, the White House has selected the five vaccine candidates they consider most likely to succeed, The New York Times reported.

Most of the names in the plan, known as Operation Warp Speed, will come as little surprise to those who have watched the last four months of vaccine developments: Moderna, which was the first vaccine to reach humans and is now the furthest along of any US effort; J&J, which has not gone into trials but received around $500 million in funding from BARDA earlier this year; the joint AstraZeneca-Oxford venture which was granted $1.2 billion from BARDA two weeks ago; Pfizer, which has been working with the mRNA biotech BioNTech; and Merck, which just entered the race and expects to put their two vaccine candidates into humans later this year.

Data on remdesivir — the first drug shown to benefit Covid-19 patients in a randomized, controlled trial setting — may be murky, but its maker Gilead could reap billions from the sales of the failed Ebola therapy, according to an estimate by a prominent Wall Street analyst. However, the forecast, which is based on a $5,000-per-course US price tag, triggered the ire of one top drug price expert.