Just a few months af­ter phar­ma gi­ant No­var­tis part­nered up with Sci­ence 37 on its vir­tu­al ap­proach to clin­i­cal tri­al work, Re­code re­ports that the would-be CRO dis­rup­tor is in talks with Soft­Bank ex­ecs on a $150 mil­lion in­vest­ment.

Noah Craft, Sci­ence 37 CEO

Soft­Bank, which pro­vid­ed Roivant chief Vivek Ra­maswamy with more than a bil­lion dol­lars to in­vest in biotech, ev­i­dent­ly has been drawn to Sci­ence 37’s promise that it can ef­fi­cient­ly and ef­fec­tive­ly re­cruit pa­tients for clin­i­cal tri­als with­out forc­ing them in­to a tri­al site. Us­ing new telemed­i­cine tech, they say they can ac­cu­mu­late clean datasets to show whether or not new drugs are work­ing — hop­ing to dis­rupt the big play­ers who now dom­i­nate the CRO world.

Quot­ing sources, Re­code notes that Sci­ence 37 is plan­ning to val­ue it­self at $300 mil­lion for this deal, up about $100 mil­lion since Lux Cap­i­tal and Google’s GV helped back the com­pa­ny a lit­tle more than a year ago. 

Soft­Bank’s big, $98 bil­lion Vi­sion Fund has made re­peat­ed for­ays in­to the world of drug de­vel­op­ment and tech­nol­o­gy. Aside from Roivant, the group par­tic­i­pat­ed in the mas­sive $500 mil­lion round to back George Scan­gos’ Vir, which is work­ing on an in­fec­tious dis­ease drug pipeline.

The CRO busi­ness has un­der­gone a decade of shak­ing out as pri­vate eq­ui­ty groups moved in to buy up the out­sourc­ing com­pa­nies and meld them in­to a set of large and ag­gres­sive glob­al play­ers, of­ten with big staffs. Shak­ing them up with a new tech ap­proach won’t come eas­i­ly in an R&D world where safe and de­pend­able are key watch­words in the high-risk world of drug de­vel­op­ment.

But Sci­ence 37 con­tin­ues to build up a head of steam to give it a try.

An increase in demand of up to 79% for clinical trials in China has prompted Novotech the Asia-Pacific CRO to rapidly expand the China team, appointing expert local clinical executives to their Shanghai and Hong Kong offices. The company is planning to expand their team by 30% over the next quarter.

Novotech China has seen considerable demand recently which is borne out by research from GlobalData:
A global migration of clinical research is occurring from high-income countries to low and middle-income countries with emerging economies. Over the period 2017 to 2018, for example, the number of clinical trial sites opened by biotech companies in Asia-Pacific increased by 35% compared to 8% in the rest of the world, with growth as high as 79% in China.
Novotech CEO Dr John Moller said China offers the largest population in the world, rapid economic growth, and an increasing willingness by government to invest in research and development.
Novotech’s 23 years of experience working in the region means we are the ideal CRO partner for USA biotechs wanting to tap the research expertise and opportunities that China offers.
There are over 22,000 active investigators in Greater China, with about 5,000 investigators with experience on at least 3 studies (source GlobalData).

From PD-1 targeting to the RAS pathway to the STING complex, Thomas Gajewski has spent the past two decades of his career decoding the various ways the immune system can be unleashed to defend against cancer. So when the University of Chicago professor comes around to putting all his findings into a new platform for finding new targets, VCs and pharma groups alike pay attention.

“He’s been studying T cells for 20 years, plus he’s one of the world’s leaders if not the world leader in the space,” David Steinberg, partner at Longwood Fund, said. “Furthermore, let me add he did a lot of the foundational research and also some of the seminal clinical trials in the existing set of I/O agents. He understands the space really well, he understands the current strengths, and I think he understood really well what was missing, so he knew where to look.”

Earlier this week we got a look at Senator Kamala Harris’ position on drug prices. She’s proposing that HHS take an average price from single-payer systems like the UK, Germany and Canada — which leverage market access for lower prices — and use that to set the US price. Anything drug companies collect above that would be taxed at a rate of 100%.

And the rhetoric is scathing:
While families struggle to make it to the end of the month, pharmaceutical companies are turning record profits. They’re spending nearly as much on advertising as R&D. They’re manipulating their market power to hike prices on lifesaving generic drugs. They’re making twice the profit of the average industry in America and still increased drug prices by 10.5% over the past six months alone. Meanwhile, they are charging dramatically higher prices to American consumers.
That’s an escalation on Joe Biden’s plan, which includes drug importation from those cheaper markets as well as allowing Medicare to negotiate prices — something that virtually all Dems agree on now.