A lit­tle more than six months af­ter win­ning an en­dorse­ment from Pfiz­er for its IBD mi­cro­bio­me pro­gram, Vedan­ta Bio­sciences is ready to step on the gas.

Vedan­ta wrapped up a $68 mil­lion Se­ries D raise Wednes­day morn­ing, which in­clud­ed the $25 mil­lion eq­ui­ty in­vest­ment Pfiz­er plunked down back in Jan­u­ary. With the biotech con­tent with its ear­ly-stage re­sults and man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties, Vedan­ta is get­ting ready to po­ten­tial­ly launch mul­ti­ple mid- to late-stage stud­ies and need­ed the ex­tra cash, CEO Bernat Olle tells End­points News.

“With the last fi­nanc­ing, we al­ready start­ed to delve in­to our first pa­tient stud­ies, in­clud­ing our lead pro­gram in­to Clostrid­ioides dif­fi­cile in­fec­tion, which is in Phase II,” Olle said. “Now that we’re look­ing at the end of that study, in an­tic­i­pa­tion of the re­sults we’re start­ing to pre­pare for the late-stage study.”

The Phase II study is ex­pect­ed to read out da­ta by the end of Sep­tem­ber, and Vedan­ta plans to have its Phase III man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty up and run­ning at the end of 2021. Should every­thing pro­ceed ac­cord­ing to plan, the Phase III tri­al will be­gin in mid-2022.

On top of this lead can­di­date, known as VE303, Vedan­ta is an­tic­i­pat­ing ad­vanc­ing a sec­ond pro­gram for IBD with Wednes­day’s funds. That’s Pfiz­er’s fo­cus, and the biotech ex­pects to launch the Phase II study for the can­di­date, known as VE202, in the sec­ond half of this year.

Vedan­ta is aim­ing to shake up the field of mi­cro­bio­me treat­ments, which thus far has typ­i­cal­ly seen com­pa­nies de­vel­op ther­a­peu­tics based on fe­cal trans­plants to re­store bal­ance of healthy mi­crobes in the gut. The Cam­bridge, MA-based biotech is tak­ing a dif­fer­ent ap­proach, how­ev­er, uti­liz­ing clon­al cell banks to make their ex­per­i­men­tal drugs rather than re­ly on donor sam­ples.

It’s a method Olle says is sim­i­lar to how the biotech in­dus­try evolved over the years from mak­ing drugs based on plas­ma do­na­tions to fo­cus­ing more on mon­o­clon­al an­ti­bod­ies. The old ap­proach be­came a par­tic­u­lar thorn in biotech’s side sev­er­al decades ago, Olle said, when the rise of HIV and he­pati­tis C — which could be passed through trans­fu­sions — made the treat­ments high­ly risky.

Look­ing out at the rest of the mi­cro­bio­me field, Olle thinks sim­i­lar is­sues are pop­ping up again. Vedan­ta hopes to elim­i­nate the vari­abil­i­ty seen among donor sam­ples and de­vel­op­ing ther­a­pies that are all the same.

With their cell banks, Vedan­ta can “cre­ate a cell line, store it in a freez­er and es­sen­tial­ly have un­lim­it­ed sup­ply in the fu­ture,” Olle said. “We can go back to the freez­er stock and start the fer­men­ta­tion process where every cap­sule has the ex­act same com­po­si­tion every time, in con­trast to those based on trans­plants.”

In­vestors large­ly fled the mi­cro­bio­me treat­ment space af­ter a key late-stage flop in 2016 from Seres Ther­a­peu­tics sent VCs run­ning. But cash has slow­ly start­ed to trick­le back in as new suc­cess­es emerge. In May 2020, Re­bi­otix pre­sent­ed pos­i­tive da­ta from a place­bo-con­trolled study for its own C. diff trans­plant ther­a­py, and ear­li­er this month, af­ter Seres found promis­ing re­sults with a new tack, Nestlé dropped $525 mil­lion to fund de­vel­op­ment for their lead mi­cro­bio­me treat­ment.

The round al­so marks an­oth­er win this week for PureTech, which found­ed Vedan­ta in 2010. On Mon­day, the PureTech-backed en­ti­ty Gele­sis, de­vel­op­ing a weight man­age­ment cap­sule that makes pa­tients feel fuller, shuf­fled to Nas­daq through a SPAC merg­er.

Wednes­day’s fi­nanc­ing was led by af­fil­i­ates of Mag­ne­tar Cap­i­tal. Oth­er par­tic­i­pants in­clud­ed new and ear­li­er in­vestors such as Veri­tion Fund Man­age­ment, Fo­s­un Health Cap­i­tal, co-founder PureTech Health, Rock Springs Cap­i­tal, Skyviews Life Sci­ence, JSR Cor­po­ra­tion, Sym­Bio­sis LLC, Shumway Cap­i­tal and Health for Life Cap­i­tal, among oth­ers.

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.

Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision on Friday to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years, Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to somewhat reassure women that states will not be able to ban the prescription drug sometimes used for abortions.

Following the decision, the New England Journal of Medicine also published an editorial strongly condemning the reversal, saying it “serves American families poorly, putting their health, safety, finances, and futures at risk.”

While European companies, including BioNTech, are focused on increasing vaccine access to African countries by setting up vaccine manufacturing facilities, the European Union is looking westward to Latin America and the Caribbean.

Speaking at a press conference with Spanish Prime Minister Pédro Sanchez, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU is launching a new initiative for vaccines and medicines manufacturing in Latin America, to get drugs to Latin America and the Caribbean faster.

GSK, newly branded and soon-to-be demerged, shared interim results from its Phase II trial on its chronic hepatitis B treatment, one that it says has the “potential to lead to a functional cure.”

At a presentation at the EASL International Liver Congress, GSK shared that in around 450 patients who received its hep B drug bepirovirsen for 24 weeks, just under 30% had hepatitis B surface antigen and viral DNA levels that were too low to detect.