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.

Bei­jing R&D Cen­ter, Brii Bio

Click on the im­age to see the full-sized ver­sion

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.”

An FDA advisory committee noted with concern a small safety database but unanimously endorsed a Horizon Therapeutics drug for a rare eye autoimmune disease that can blind patients: teprotumumab for thyroid eye disease (TED).

“It was a pretty easy vote,” said Erica Brittain, an NIH biostatistician and one of the 12 panelists on FDA’s Dermatologic and Ophthalmic Drugs Advisory Committee.

Timing is Everything
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Amid Shehnaaz Suliman’s lengthy resume it could be easy to miss her stint leading early-stage Alzheimer’s R&D at Genentech, where she oversaw a program for the ill-fated crenezumab and initiated one of the first prevention studies around the devastating neurodegenerative disease. But it is this experience that she — after thinking long and hard about her next career move over the past months — will be leaning heavily on as the first president and COO of Alector.

Biogen’s fierce focus on disorders of the brain has hit another roadblock.

On Friday, the US drugmaker — which recently resurrected its amyloid-targeting Alzheimer’s drug, aducanumab — said its anti-tau drug, gosuranemab, failed a mid-stage study in patients with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a rare brain disorder that results from deterioration of brain cells that control movement and thought.