Right from the start, the dis­cov­ery plan at Flag­ship-spawned Cel­lar­i­ty was to take their cues from cell bi­ol­o­gy and fol­low them to new drugs. Rather than start with a tar­get and de­vel­op a drug to hit it, they’d use new tech­nol­o­gy to dig­i­tal­ly map cell be­hav­ior and then de­vel­op new drugs from what they learned.

“Over the past decades it has al­ways been about find­ing a tar­get, about re­duc­ing a dis­ease to a sin­gle mol­e­c­u­lar tar­get,” says Fab­rice Chouraqui, the No­var­tis vet who was re­cruit­ed to run the op­er­a­tion about 9 months ago. “And that ap­proach has pro­duced thou­sands of life-sav­ing med­i­cines. Yet, this ap­proach has lim­i­ta­tions. A mol­e­c­u­lar tar­get ap­proach is fine when you talk about a sim­ple dis­ease, but for very com­plex dis­eases like neu­rode­gen­er­a­tion, like meta­bol­ic dis­ease, like can­cer, you hope to re­al­ly har­ness the com­plex­i­ty of hu­man bi­ol­o­gy.

“We de­vel­oped a drug dis­cov­ery plat­form to de­sign med­i­cines at the lev­el of the cell, which as we both know is the fun­da­men­tal of life,” says the CEO.

Net­work bi­ol­o­gy, high res­o­lu­tion da­ta and the right ma­chine learn­ing tools give them bet­ter in­sights in­to un­der­stand­ing “how a cell moves from a state of health to a state of dis­ease.”

For the staff at Cel­lar­i­ty, that ap­proach has helped cre­ate a va­ri­ety of pre­clin­i­cal dis­cov­ery projects. And now there’s $123 mil­lion more to fi­nance the next leg of the ex­plo­ration as they con­tin­ue the pipeline work, with maybe 1 or 2 more years to go be­fore they reach the clin­ic.

“We’ve been able to re­al­ly progress our pipeline,” says Chouraqui. “To­day we have 7 drug dis­cov­ery pro­grams in 4 dif­fer­ent dis­ease ar­eas and I think those 4 dis­ease ar­eas re­al­ly show­case the breadth and the depth of our plat­form; they range from meta­bol­ic dis­ease to im­muno-on­col­o­gy. I think we are get­ting clos­er to move in­to the clin­ic. The goal is not to rush in­to the clin­ic with one pro­gram, we have a plat­form which can be vir­tu­al­ly ap­plied to any dis­ease area.”

And now they have the mon­ey to work up a stream of new drug pro­grams. But that’s about as de­tailed as the pub­lic sto­ry gets at this stage of the jour­ney. Like most star­tups, it’s best to get to the late pre­clin­i­cal stage be­fore you start open­ing up about how the lead ther­a­pies work.

The in­sid­er sto­ry, though, was good enough to bring in an ex­pand­ed syn­di­cate for the rich round. Black­Rock, The Bau­post Group, Banque Pictet and 8 oth­er un­named in­vestors have jumped in to grab a front row seat in the lab. And Chouraqui plans to do some ac­tive re­cruit­ing to dou­ble the size of the staff this year.

David Livingston, the Dana-Farber/Harvard Med scientist who helped shine a light on some of the key molecular drivers of breast and ovarian cancer, died unexpectedly last Sunday.

One of the senior leaders at Dana-Farber during his nearly half century of work there, Livingston was credited with shedding light on the genes that regulate cell growth, with insights into inherited BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that helped lay the scientific foundation for targeted therapies and earlier detection that have transformed the field.

Three Senate Democrats are backing an FDA plan to require mandatory prescriber education for opioids as overdose deaths have risen sharply over the past decade, with almost 97,000 American opioid-related overdose deaths in the past year alone.

While acknowledging a decline in overall opioid analgesic dispensing in recent years, the FDA said it’s reconsidering the need for mandatory prescriber training through a REMS given the current situation with overdoses, and is seeking input on the aspects of the opioid crisis that mandatory training could potentially mitigate.

Editor’s note: Interested in following biopharma’s fast-paced IPO market? You can bookmark our IPO Tracker here.

It took seven months from exiting “quiet mode” for Ventyx Biosciences to land its very own stock ticker, raising $165 million in venture funds along the way.

Now, after pricing a massive $151.5 million IPO, the Encinitas, CA-based biotech is gunning for Phase II.

Ventyx priced close to 9.5 million shares at $16 apiece on Wednesday, the midpoint of its $15 to $17 range. CEO Raju Mohan filed the S-1 papers at the end of September, just over a week after unveiling a $114 million Series B round. He penciled in the standard figure of $100 million at first, likely knowing that in the last year, it’s been common for biotechs to raise much more than those initial estimates.

Just as Avoro Capital’s campaign to derail Merck’s proposed $11.5 billion buyout of Acceleron gains steam, Bristol Myers Squibb is leaning in with some hefty counterweight.

The pharma giant is planning to tender its Acceleron shares, Bloomberg reported, which add up to a sizable 11.5% stake. Based on the offer price, the sale would net Bristol Myers around $1.3 billion.

To complete its deal, Merck needs a majority of shareholders to agree to sell their shares.