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.

There haven’t been a lot of big venture rounds for biotech companies looking to run a Phase II study in Alzheimer’s.

The field has been a disaster over the past decade. Amyloid didn’t pan out as a target — going down in a litany of Phase III failures — and is now making its last stand at Biogen. Tau is a comer, but when you look around and all you see is destruction, the idea of backing a startup trying to find complex cocktails to swing the course of this devilishly complicated memory-wasting disease would daunt the pluckiest investors.

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

Money has never been an issue for Everest Medicines. With an essentially open tab from their founders at C-Bridge Capital, the biotech has gone two and a half years racking up drug after drug, bringing in top exec after top exec, and issuing clinical update after update.

But now other investors want in — and they’re betting big.

Everest is closing its Series C at $310 million. The first $50 million comes from the Jiashan National Economic and Technological Development Zone; the remaining C-2 tranche was led by Janchor Partners, with RA Capital Management and Hillhouse Capital as co-leaders. Decheng Capital, GT Fund, Janus Henderson Investors, Rock Springs Capital, Octagon Investments all joined.

It’s been precisely one year and one day since Neil Woodford froze his once-vaunted fund, and while a global pandemic has recently shielded him from the torrent of headlines, the fallout continues.

Today, the California-based patent licensing firm Acacia Research acquired the fund’s shares for 19 healthcare and biotech companies for $284 million.  Those companies include shares for public and private companies and count some of Woodford’s most prominent bio-bets, such as Theravance Biopharma, Oxford Nanopore and Mereo Biopharma, according to Sky News, which first reported the sale. It won’t include shares for BenevelontAI, the machine learning biotech once valued at $2 billion.

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.