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.

By Natasha Cowan, Content Marketing Manager at Blue Latitude Health.
Many stakeholders are confused by novel precision medicines, including patients and healthcare professionals. So, how can industry help them to navigate this complexity?

Precision medicine represents a new paradigm in healthcare. It embodies the shift from treating many patients with the same therapy, to having the tools to identify the best treatment for every patient.

When Link Fund Solutions announced that it is closing Woodford Equity Income Fund permanently and kicking out Neil Woodford, it was implied that investors probably won’t get back everything they entrusted to the fund manager. But nobody knew just how much they would lose.

An internal analysis commissioned by Link suggested that the collective loss could amount to £1 billion — out of a fund last valued at £3.1 billion — Citywire has revealed.

The FDA has placed a hold on a Phase II AML trial from the small immuno-oncology biotech Marker Therapeutics. Marker disclosed the issue two weeks after responding to FDA concerns, adding it to the Q3 release Tuesday. The company also announced it was scrapping a Phase II ovarian cancer program it determined was unlikely to succeed.

The agency’s concern centers around two reagents used in manufacturing for their trial for acute myeloid leukemia patients who have received a stem cell transplant. The reagents are from third parties and not present in the final product, Marker said.

Hold up your hand. Make a fist. Now open it. And again.

If you can do it fully and with ease, then the proteins in your hand are likely working properly. If you can’t then they may not be. In people with myotonic muscular dystrophy, something more atomic is going on.

In those folks, the problem is RNA. Certain base pairs repeat far beyond normal, up to 11,000 superfluous letters in some cases. The extended strands form “clumps.” Proteins misform and can’t function properly. They often allow one movement but not the reverse, a condition called myotonia that gives the dystrophy its name.