Large­ly known for its non­pep­tide small mol­e­cule re­search, Cri­net­ics has been keep­ing its ra­dio­phar­ma work com­par­a­tive­ly un­der wraps. But that changed Mon­day af­ter­noon as the Cal­i­for­nia biotech spun out a new com­pa­ny fo­cused sole­ly on the bur­geon­ing field.

Cri­net­ics launched Ra­dio­net­ics af­ter the clos­ing bell Mon­day, the com­pa­ny an­nounced, seed­ing the new en­ti­ty with $30 mil­lion raised from 5AM Ven­tures and Fra­zier Health­care Part­ners. Ra­dio­net­ics will start with its own ra­dio­phar­ma-cen­tric plat­form and a pipeline of 10 pro­grams aimed at sol­id tu­mors.

“We’re go­ing to hit the ground run­ning,” Cri­net­ics CEO Scott Struthers told End­points News. Struthers will al­so serve on the Ra­dio­net­ics board, and he added that there’s no time­line on any of the pro­grams yet.

The pipeline comes out of Cri­net­ics’ dis­cov­ery en­gine, and it’s aimed at cre­at­ing a po­ten­tial­ly new busi­ness mod­el for the com­pa­ny. Though it’s not giv­ing Ra­dio­net­ics any more mon­ey, Struthers said Cri­net­ics is es­sen­tial­ly act­ing as a VC by sign­ing on­to a re­search agree­ment with Ra­dio­net­ics. The spin­out will re­ceive an ex­clu­sive li­cense for the plat­form and pro­gram in ex­change for more than $1 bil­lion in mile­stones.

Struthers’ mo­ti­va­tion to launch this new com­pa­ny now large­ly stems from the suc­cess he’s seen with the prostate can­cer drug Lu­tathera, de­vel­oped by Ad­vanced Ac­cel­er­a­tor Ap­pli­ca­tions and ac­quired by No­var­tis in 2017. He wants to hit “all sol­id tu­mors” with Ra­dio­net­ics, which he freely ad­mits is a bold claim.

But both com­pa­nies’ fo­cus on small mol­e­cules means they can hit more tar­gets than com­pa­nies that re­ly on pep­tides, as many ra­dio­phar­ma com­pa­nies do.

“The clin­i­cal ben­e­fit there has just been re­mark­able such that No­var­tis has made it one of its pil­lars of the plat­forms for their com­pa­ny,” Struthers said. “With that suc­cess, any re­al can­cer cen­ter now is go­ing to need this type of nu­clear med­i­cine ca­pa­bil­i­ty … we want to ex­pand that to a broad range of ad­di­tion­al can­cer types.”

As the ra­dio­phar­ma world con­tin­ues to de­vel­op, No­var­tis has emerged as the leader of the pack. In ad­di­tion to Lu­tathera, the bio­phar­ma re­ceived a break­through ther­a­py des­ig­na­tion for a pro­gram ac­quired in its $2.1 bil­lion En­do­cyte buy­out back in 2018, af­ter the can­di­date scored a Phase III win in March of this year.

No­var­tis’ drug tar­gets prostate-spe­cif­ic mem­brane anti­gen, or PS­MA, which is com­mon­ly found in metasta­t­ic prostate can­cer.

There are oth­er play­ers out there as well. Ger­many’s ITM raised $109 mil­lion in loan fi­nanc­ing back in April and the biotech Ak­tis se­cured a $72 mil­lion round. Rayze­Bio has been the biggest re­cent win­ner, how­ev­er, land­ing a $258 mil­lion Se­ries C in June.

As Icelandic billionaire Róbert Wessman tries to take down AbbVie’s megablockbuster Humira in court, he’s also taking his biosimilar upstart to the big time with a $2.25 billion SPAC merger, Nasdaq launch and $450 million raise announced early Tuesday.

While Wessman’s Alvotech has not won FDA approval for any of its biosimilar candidates yet, the company was the first to file with the FDA for approval of its high-concentration Humira biosimilar and to have successfully conducted a switching study in support of a highly-coveted interchangeability designation. But other companies like Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim and Pfizer have since caught up ahead of the launches of their own Humira biosimilar competitors in 2023.

Gary Glick is back at it again, founding yet another biotech company. And by the sheer size of its first raise, this may be the biggest one yet.

Glick has assembled what he calls an all-star roster and recruited one of the biggest healthcare investors in OrbiMed to put together a massive $218 million Series A for his newest venture, Odyssey Therapeutics. The launch, announced Tuesday morning and co-led by SR One Capital Management, comes not three months after Glick sold First Wave Bio to AzurRx for $229 million.