Jim Tanan­baum was look­ing for a spe­cif­ic type of com­pa­ny, one with a ge­net­ics-dri­ven plat­form, when he launched Fore­site Cap­i­tal’s first blank check com­pa­ny. And he’s found it in Gem­i­ni Ther­a­peu­tics.

Just two months af­ter FS De­vel­op­ment Corp land­ed on Nas­daq with $121 mil­lion in the bank, it will give way to Gem­i­ni fol­low­ing a merg­er and con­cur­rent pri­vate place­ment to­tal­ing $95 mil­lion.

At­las Ven­ture, Light­stone Ven­tures and Or­biMed — the orig­i­nal in­vestors lead­ing Gem­i­ni’s $42.5 mil­lion launch round three years ago — are on the ros­ter Fore­site has cor­ralled, along­side ex­ist­ing in­vestor Wu Cap­i­tal. Fi­deli­ty, Welling­ton Man­age­ment, Box­er Cap­i­tal of Tavi­s­tock Group, Alyeska In­vest­ment Group, Su­vret­ta Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, CVF, DAF­NA Cap­i­tal and Acorn Bioven­tures tagged along.

In a year where biotech SPAC is gath­er­ing near­ly as much steam as IPOs, the sub­se­quent merg­er deals are slow­er to fol­low. Spon­sors — from 5AM, Cas­din, Cor­morant, Deer­field, EcoR1 to MPM — ap­pear to be tak­ing their time (they have two years max) to iden­ti­fy the right biotech to take pub­lic.

But Fore­site chief Tanan­baum, who dou­bled as pres­i­dent and CEO of FS De­vel­op­ment Corp, quick­ly saw some­thing to like about Gem­i­ni’s ap­proach of tai­lor-mak­ing treat­ments for sub­pop­u­la­tions of pa­tients with mac­u­lar de­gen­er­a­tion based on their ge­net­ic vari­ants.

Ja­son Meyen­burg

It spawned a pipeline span­ning re­com­bi­nant pro­tein, mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body and gene ther­a­py, which will con­tin­ue to be over­seen by Gem­i­ni CEO Ja­son Meyen­burg.

The biotech high­light­ed three main groups of pro­grams that will ben­e­fit from the new cash: GEM103, the lead prod­uct can­di­date for dry AMD, cur­rent­ly in Phase IIa for pa­tients with a com­ple­ment Fac­tor H mu­ta­tion; oth­er clin­i­cal pro­grams in cer­tain wet AMD pa­tients with sec­ondary mac­u­lar at­ro­phy; and fu­ture pro­grams to treat in­ter­me­di­ate AMD as well as sys­temic dis­eases as­so­ci­at­ed with com­ple­ment Fac­tor H dys­func­tion.

Hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly con­sid­ered go­ing pub­lic, Gem­i­ni’s pro­file fits per­fect­ly with what he’d con­sid­er an ide­al can­di­date for a blank check hunter, At­las’ Bruce Booth ob­served in a blog post as he cel­e­brates his firm’s first SPAC ex­it:

The op­ti­mal biotech merg­er tar­get pro­file, in my opin­ion, is the “pre-crossover” pri­vate com­pa­ny that has an emerg­ing prod­uct pipeline with an ex­pec­ta­tion of mean­ing­ful clin­i­cal news flow over the next 1-3 years. It ob­vi­ous­ly needs to be a sto­ry that will ap­peal to biotech pub­lic mar­ket in­vestors. This like­ly means the com­pa­ny has raised $25-100M in pre­ferred stock fi­nanc­ings, but hasn’t yet built a ros­ter of cus­tom­ary crossover in­vestors yet. In lieu of the crossover/IPO two-step di­lu­tion of a tra­di­tion­al path, and the risk of mar­ket volatil­i­ty, ac­cess­ing the pub­lic mar­kets via a de­fined SPAC timetable may be smarter.

Billionaire Peter Thiel has made significant and sometimes controversial pushes into life sciences over the past few years, and one of his startups out of Berlin has made a new acquisition less than two months after achieving unicorn status.

ATAI Life Sciences purchased a majority stake Tuesday in Recognify Life Sciences, a company focused on developing treatments for cognitive impairment associated with schizophrenia. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the acquisition follows up a $125 million Series C in November co-led by Thiel, leading to a post-money valuation of about $1 billion for ATAI.

Between Covid-19 vaccines and gene therapies, the contract manufacturing market for viral vector tech has grown at a rapid clip. Thermo Fisher Scientific, already one of the biggest CDMOs on the block, has now made a move to buoy its EU footprint in that field.

Thermo Fisher will pay $878 million to acquire Henogen SA, Novasep’s viral vector manufacturing business, which comprises two Belgian locations in Seneffe and Gosselies that offer over 75,000 square feet of clinical and commercial manufacturing capacity, the Massachusetts company said Friday.

Five Prime Therapeutics has finalized a plan to take their comeback gastric cancer drug into late-stage studies.

The South San Francisco-based biotech released full Phase II data for bemarituzumab on Friday, which Five Prime said in November met all of its pre-specified efficacy endpoints in a topline readout. Now, the company is announcing it plans to launch a Phase III trial for the program in 2021. Following November’s readout, the future of bemarituzumab had not yet been finalized.