Long­time biotech ex­ec David de Graaf has the cash he needs to set up the pre­clin­i­cal foun­da­tion for his coen­zyme A me­tab­o­lism com­pa­ny Comet. A few high-pro­file in­vestors joined the ven­ture syn­di­cate to sup­ply Comet with $28.5 mil­lion in launch mon­ey — enough to get it two years in­to the plat­form-build­ing game, with­in knock­ing dis­tance of the clin­ic.

Canaan jumped in along­side ex­ist­ing in­vestor Sofinno­va Part­ners to co-lead the round, with par­tic­i­pa­tion by ex­ist­ing in­vestor INKEF Cap­i­tal and new in­vestor BioIn­no­va­tion Cap­i­tal.

Pe­ter Van Vlas­se­laer As­ceneu­ron

By next year Comet will have 3 or 4 com­pounds un­der the mi­cro­scope, with plans to take 1 of those in­to an IND sub­mis­sion for 2021, clos­ing in on the clin­ic. In the mean­time, says the Syn­tim­mune vet, they’ll be look­ing at part­ner­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties to help beef up their bank ac­count and grow the fledg­ling pipeline.

Dis­cov­ered 70 years ago, every cell re­quires coen­zyme A to break down fats and sug­ars to cre­ate en­er­gy. And de­fects in the path­way are linked to a pletho­ra of dis­eases, with ap­pli­ca­tions in neu­rol­o­gy, meta­bol­ic dis­eases and can­cer.

Art Taveras LinkedIn

Comet has a team of 8 in place in their new Kendall Square lab, with plans to grow to 20 by the end of next year, tap­ping in on lo­cal tal­ent as they con­cen­trate their forces on the metabo­lites linked to coen­zyme A. “The metabo­lites,” says de Graaf, “are in­cred­i­bly im­por­tant.”

“The com­pa­ny is op­er­at­ing in a vir­tu­al white space, yet has built a broad patent port­fo­lio around its core tech­nol­o­gy,” says chair­man Pe­ter Van Vlas­se­laer, who has a string of star­tups to his cred­it, in­clud­ing Ar­mo. “We see ex­cit­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties in the ar­eas of im­muno-me­tab­o­lism and neu­ro-me­tab­o­lism.”

The team in­cludes chief sci­en­tif­ic of­fi­cer Art Taveras and co-founder and chief tech­nol­o­gy of­fi­cer Enej Kuscer, who’s worked in this field for years.

Enej Kuscer LinkedIn

There’s at least one oth­er coen­zyme A com­pa­ny out there, un­der the wing of Bridge­Bio in San Fran­cis­co. But de Graaf ap­pears less in­ter­est­ed in the rare dis­ease ap­proach to the field than the broad­er plat­form that can be built around this tar­get. And that leaves plen­ty of tar­gets of op­por­tu­ni­ty.

Fenlai Tan still gets chills thinking about the darkest day of his life.

Three out of eight lung cancer patients who received a tyrosine kinase inhibitor developed by his company, Betta Pharma, died in the span of a month. Tan, the chief medical officer, was summoned to Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where the head of the clinical trial department told him that the trial investigators would be conducting an autopsy to see if the patients had died of the disease — they were all very sick by the time they enrolled — or of interstitial lung disease, a deadly side effect tied to the TKI class that’s been reported in Japan.

After flopping a test in Covid-19 earlier this year, Angion’s lead organ damage drug has now hit the skids again in kidney transplant patients.

Angion and partner Vifor Pharma’s ANG-3777 failed to beat out placebo in terms of improving eGFR, a measure of kidney function, in patients who had received a deceased donor kidney transplant and were at high risk of developing what is known as delayed graft function, according to Phase III results released Tuesday.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on Tuesday voted 17-0, with one panelist abstaining, that the benefits of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine outweigh the risks for children between the ages of five and 12.

The vote will likely trigger a process that could allow the shots to begin rolling out as early as next week.

The vaccine, which is one-third of the adult Pfizer dose, proved to be about 90% effective in a placebo-controlled trial in which about 1,500 kids in this age range received the vaccine, and only about 12% of those receiving the vaccine had any adverse event. All serious adverse events in the trial were unrelated to the vaccine.

In a sign of its growing commitment to the continent, Moderna will supply up to 110 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine to the African Union, the company announced Tuesday. And CEO Stéphane Bancel said it’s just the first step.

“We believe our vaccine can play an important role in addressing the needs of low-income countries given its combination of high Phase 3 efficacy against COVID-19, strong durability in the real-world evidence, and superior storage and handling conditions. We recognize that access to COVID-19 vaccines continues to be a challenge in many parts of the world and we remain committed to helping to protect as many people as possible around the globe,” Bancel said in a statement.