Rick Mo­di

VCs love few things more than a proven ex­ec­u­tive team when it comes to launch­ing a new com­pa­ny. And now a group of A-lis­ters has turned to a pair of top ex­ecs out of AveX­is to steer the lat­est gene ther­a­py play­er in­to the clin­ic.

The biotech is Waltham, MA-based Affinia and the two ex­ecs are Sean Nolan and Rick Mo­di — the for­mer CEO and CBO re­spec­tive­ly of AveX­is, the gene ther­a­py pi­o­neer that fetched $8.7 bil­lion in a sale to No­var­tis. Nolan has now tak­en the chair­man’s role at Affinia while Mo­di moves up to the CEO post at the com­pa­ny.

Sean Nolan

Both were key play­ers on a team that steered Zol­gens­ma to the mar­ket as the most ex­pen­sive once-off drug now avail­able. They worked close­ly with CSO Bri­an Kas­par, who was blamed by No­var­tis for in­clud­ing ma­nip­u­lat­ed da­ta in their mar­ket­ing ap­pli­ca­tion, trig­ger­ing a scan­dal that con­sumed No­var­tis for weeks. Kas­par ve­he­ment­ly de­nied the ac­cu­sa­tion, though, and the scan­dal qui­et­ly dis­si­pat­ed with the FDA tak­ing none of the ac­tions it had threat­ened.

The biotech’s pro­mo blast this morn­ing sug­gests Affinia is on to a bet­ter AAV tech plat­form than what’s cur­rent­ly in cir­cu­la­tion. Back­ing up that boast are 3 sci­en­tif­ic founders:

Luk Van­den­berghe, Botond Ros­ka and Aaron Tward.

— Van­den­berghe, a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Med, is cred­it­ed as a co-in­ven­tor of AAV9. He de­vel­oped the tech that was de­vel­oped at the Grous­beck Gene Ther­a­py Cen­ter un­der a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween Lon­za and Mass­a­chu­setts Eye and Ear.

— Ros­ka is the di­rec­tor of the In­sti­tute of Mol­e­c­u­lar and Clin­i­cal Oph­thal­mol­o­gy Basel.

— Tward is an as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor at UC-San Fran­cis­co.

Luk Van­den­berghe

“Affinia Ther­a­peu­tics is bring­ing to­geth­er com­ple­men­tary ex­per­tise al­low­ing us to re­al­ize a ra­tio­nal de­sign fu­ture for AAV vec­tors, pro­mot­ers and oth­er com­po­nents of gene ther­a­pies. By lever­ag­ing syn­thet­ic and sys­tems bi­ol­o­gy com­bined with high-through­put screen­ing and tis­sue and sin­gle-cell res­o­lu­tion, we are as­pir­ing to achieve much-need­ed im­proved phar­ma­co­log­i­cal con­trol of this nov­el modal­i­ty in med­i­cine,” said Van­den­berghe in a pre­pared state­ment.

That line­up war­rant­ed a $60 mil­lion launch round from the seed in­vestors at F-Prime Cap­i­tal and New En­ter­prise As­so­ci­ates, with At­las jump­ing in for the first time.

When Venrock partner Bryan Roberts went to check the results from their annual survey of healthcare leaders, what he found was an imprint of the pandemic’s slow arrival in America.

The venture firm had sent their form out to hundreds of insurance and health tech executives, investors, officials and academics on February 24 and gave them two weeks to fill it out. No Americans had died at that point but the coronavirus had become enough of a global crisis that they included two questions about the virus, including “Total U.S. deaths in 2020 from the novel coronavirus will be:”.

When Merck dived into the R&D fray for a Covid-19 vaccine earlier this week, execs made it clear that they’re not necessarily looking to be first — with CEO Ken Frazier throwing cold water on the hotly-discussed 12- to 18-month timelines. But when it does emerge from behind, the pharma giant clearly expects to play a significant part.

Part of that will depend on next-generation delivery technology that reshapes the world’s imagination of a vaccine.