Flag­ship is build­ing a big-name C-suite at its new, $220 mil­lion merged biotech.

Reper­toire Im­mune Med­i­cines, which al­ready boasts for­mer Biover­a­tiv chief John Cox as its CEO, an­nounced yes­ter­day that An­tho­ny Coyle, the for­mer Pfiz­er CSO and the found­ing CEO of Pan­dion, will join as their head of R&D.

“As we progress clin­i­cal tri­als for our mul­ti-clon­al T cell can­di­dates in im­muno-on­col­o­gy, Tony’s deep ex­per­tise in cel­lu­lar im­munol­o­gy and nov­el ther­a­peu­tic de­vel­op­ment will help us achieve our vi­sion of cre­at­ing a new class of trans­for­ma­tive med­i­cines for pa­tients,” Cox said in a state­ment.

Coyle comes on as Reper­toire looks to bridge the tech­nolo­gies of their two pre­de­ces­sor com­pa­nies: ear­li­er this year out of a merg­er of the Flag­ship star­tups Co­gen Im­mune Med­i­cines and Torque Ther­a­peu­tics. The idea was to com­bine Co­gen’s T cell analy­sis tech with Torque’s T cell ther­a­pies. Al­though the com­pa­ny has been pri­mar­i­ly fo­cused so far in can­cer, they’ve re­cent­ly point­ed to the po­ten­tial in au­toim­mune dis­or­ders, where Coyle has worked for the bet­ter part of 20 years.

Be­tween the two plat­forms, they’ll al­so work on fig­ur­ing out what and how T cells “see,” de­cod­ing the pre­cise in­ter­ac­tions be­tween these im­mune cells and the anti­gens they sur­veil. They use that in­fo to prime T cells to see par­tic­u­lar can­cer anti­gens, and fur­ther equip the cells with cy­tokines like IL-15 that ac­ti­vate in the tu­mor mi­cro-en­vi­ron­ment. A Phase I is on­go­ing for their lead ther­a­py, TRQ-1501, in both lym­phoma and sol­id tu­mors.

Coyle doesn’t have ex­ten­sive ex­pe­ri­ence in cell ther­a­py but his most re­cent work was T cell-ad­ja­cent and he brings a wealth of ex­pe­ri­ence in im­munol­o­gy dat­ing back to his post­doc days at the In­sti­tut Pas­teur and the Na­tion­al Jew­ish Cen­ter for Im­munol­o­gy in Den­ver. He spent 13 years di­rect­ing re­search in in­flam­ma­tion bi­ol­o­gy at Mil­len­ni­um and then Med­im­mune be­fore be­com­ing CSO of Pfiz­er, where he tried to rein­vig­o­rate the ag­ing phar­ma’s re­search en­gine by launch­ing the Glob­al Cen­ters for Ther­a­peu­tic In­no­va­tion.

Most re­cent­ly, in 2017, he found­ed Pan­dion on the promise of a next-gen ap­proach to im­munol­o­gy. With back­ing from Po­laris, they would de­vel­op bis­pecifics that can fine-tune in­flam­ma­tion in par­tic­u­lar tis­sues, ac­ti­vat­ing some T cells and de­ac­ti­vat­ing oth­ers while lim­it­ing the ef­fects to one area of the body. They’re fo­cused on in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­or­ders.

In a state­ment, Coyle not­ed the ap­pli­ca­tion for Reper­toire’s tech­nol­o­gy, in not on­ly can­cer, but al­so in­fec­tious dis­ease and au­toim­mune dis­or­ders.

He’ll have plen­ty of cash to help make that hap­pen. When they merged the two com­pa­nies, Flag­ship al­so in­clud­ed a new in­vest­ment of $220 mil­lion.

When Michael Shpigelmacher started the project, he knew he’d have to fund it himself. Every other effort of its kind was academic, rejected as too risky by investors.

Shpigelmacher, a robotics geek and entrepeneur who had drifted into consulting for pharma, wanted to build the real-life equivalent of technology from the 1960s film Fantastic Voyage, the one where a submarine crew is shrunk to “about the size of a microbe” and sent on a mission to repair a scientist’s brain. He scanned the literature, found the lab that was working on the most advanced project — at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, it turned out — and started funding them with money from his own account, along with some seed cash from friends and family.

Four years ago, when Arena CEO Amit Munshi cut its ties to a troubled weight drug and doubled down on the pipeline, a cannabinoid receptor 2 agonist figured prominently in the biotech’s future. On Tuesday evening, however, Munshi’s high hopes for the drug took a nasty hit after it failed a Phase IIb study for patients with irritable bowel syndrome pain.

Put through a randomized pace with 273 patients, researchers said it flat failed the primary endpoint among the large group with abdominal pain. But they quickly went on to highlight subgroup data, always a tricky and controversial ploy, where they spotlighted a positive p value for patients with moderate to severe pain who received the high dose of the drug — one of 3 provided in the study.

As the superbug crisis heats up around the world, Scynexis says it has new data from two interim analyses that prove its antifungal has the potential to treat a broad range of infections.

“The need for new anti-infectives capable of fighting the most resistant pathogens has never been more urgent as we confront the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic,” CEO Marco Taglietti said in a statement.

When Takeda spun out a pipeline of experimental psychiatry drugs to Neurocrine in a $2 billion deal amid a post-merger shakeout, R&D chief Andy Plump described the therapies as “very interesting but still difficult.”

On Tuesday, we got some idea of how difficult.

San Diego-based Neurocrine revealed that one of the three spotlight clinical programs they’d acquired failed the primary endpoint in a Phase II trial for schizophrenia, registering a negative outcome on the change from baseline in the positive and negative syndrome scale/negative symptom factor score (PANSS NSFS).

Merck took a big gamble when it opted to jump into the Covid-19 vaccine race late, and made an equally momentous decision to back out in late January. Now, looking to chip in on the effort, Merck reportedly agreed to team up with one of the companies that has already crossed the finish line.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday is expected to announce a partnership between drugmakers Merck and Johnson & Johnson to jointly produce J&J’s recombinant protein Covid-19 vaccine that received the FDA’s emergency use authorization Saturday, the Washington Post reported.