“It’s al­ways nice to get mon­ey in the bank.”

That’s what Gan­dee­va Ther­a­peu­tics’ founder and CEO Sri­ram Sub­ra­ma­ni­am said af­ter re­veal­ing that his com­pa­ny land­ed $40 mil­lion in Se­ries A fund­ing. Gan­dee­va will use the mon­ey for its ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence-en­abled plat­form to iden­ti­fy small mol­e­cules and bi­o­log­ics at a faster pace.

The com­pa­ny is on a mis­sion to show that it can lever­age cryo-EM and AI to make a mean­ing­ful im­pact on drug dis­cov­ery, and it plans to do so with speed, us­ing AI for ex­per­i­ment pre­dic­tion.

Lux Cap­i­tal and Leaps by Bay­er led the round, with Ob­vi­ous Ven­tures, Am­gen Ven­tures, Am­pli­tude Ven­tures and Air Street Cap­i­tal al­so par­tic­i­pat­ing.

It’s a jour­ney that start­ed more than 20 years ago for Sub­ra­ma­ni­am, who spent 15 years as an in­ves­ti­ga­tor for the Na­tion­al In­sti­tute of Health’s in­tra­mur­al re­search pro­gram be­fore branch­ing out on his own.

“Walk­ing in­to cells and tis­sues was sci­ence fic­tion at that time,” he said in a call with End­points News Fri­day,

Over time, though, new tools emerged, most no­tably cryo-EM, a method by which sci­en­tists can im­age pro­teins and oth­er bi­o­log­i­cal en­ti­ties by freez­ing them and as­sault­ing them with elec­trons.

“It was clear to me that this ap­proach would be a turn­ing point for struc­tur­al bi­ol­o­gy, and it has been,” he said. “There’s no doubt that it’s been rev­o­lu­tion­ary. “

Jür­gen Eck­hardt

Speed is the foun­da­tion up­on which the plat­form is built, and for­tu­nate tim­ing is what has shaped the com­pa­ny’s work so far. Sub­ra­ma­ni­am said that his aca­d­e­m­ic lab was on­ly per­mit­ted to con­tin­ue its worth through the start of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic if they of­fered to work on so­lu­tions for the virus. Most re­cent­ly, the com­pa­ny pub­lished a pa­per about the struc­tur­al analy­sis of the Omi­cron vari­ant in Sci­ence.

“I had nev­er worked on coro­n­avirus­es be­fore, but overnight, we switched to work­ing on coro­n­avirus­es and pret­ty much have looked at the struc­tures of every vari­ant, and pret­ty much every mu­tant,” he said. “From the be­gin­ning, I knew that’s where it would be head­ed, that there would be mu­ta­tions.”

In a state­ment, Jür­gen Eck­hardt, head of Leaps by Bay­er, said:

We be­lieve Gan­dee­va’s plat­form will al­low us to com­bine pre­dic­tion and ex­per­i­men­ta­tion to vi­su­al­ize and op­ti­mize drug de­sign at atom­ic scale and with un­prece­dent­ed speed. Gan­dee­va’s re­lent­less fo­cus on us­ing their pow­er­ful imag­ing tech­nolo­gies to cast a spot­light on the im­por­tance of pro­tein con­for­ma­tion in drug de­sign is aligned with our am­bi­tion to use nov­el da­ta-dri­ven meth­ods to bring pre­ci­sion med­i­cines and break­through cures to pa­tients.

This is the sec­ond time Leaps has led a fi­nanc­ing round for a start­up in just three weeks, as it led the $80 mil­lion Se­ries A for Celli­no, a Boston-based biotech fo­cused on cell ther­a­py man­u­fac­tur­ing. Sub­ra­ma­ni­am said that hav­ing the bal­ance of in­vestors, from the tech-fo­cused minds of Lux Cap­i­tal to the in­no­va­tion-mind­ed Leaps is a “dream come true.”

“We sit at this re­al­ly in­ter­est­ing in­ter­face, so to have an in­vest­ment syn­di­cate that re­flects the vi­sion and mis­sion of the com­pa­ny, that’s very spe­cial to me,” he said.

Vanda Pharmaceuticals is making a name for itself, at least in terms of suing the FDA.

The DC-headquartered firm on Monday filed its latest suit against the agency, with the company raising concerns over the FDA’s failure to grant a fast track designation for Vanda’s potential chronic digestive disorder drug tradipitant, which is a neurokinin 1 receptor antagonist.

Specifically, Vanda said FDA’s “essential point” in its one-page denial letter on the designation pointed to “the lack of necessary safety data,” which was “inconsistent with the criteria for … Fast Track designation.”

Pfizer has agreed to pay $290,000 to settle allegations of questionable copay coupon practices in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, and Vermont from 2014 to 2018.

While the company has not admitted any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, Pfizer has agreed to issue restitution checks to about 5,000 consumers.

A Pfizer spokesperson said the company has “enhanced its co-pay coupons to alleviate the concerns raised by states and agreed to a $30,000 payment to each.”

A judge in Delaware has ruled against Astellas Pharma and Gilead in a long-running patent case over Pfizer-onwed Hospira’s generic version of Lexiscan.

The case kicked off in 2018, after Hospira submitted an Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) for approval to market a generic version of Gilead’s Lexiscan. The drug is used in myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI), a type of nuclear stress test.