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.

Biotech is one of the smartest, best educated industries on the planet. PhDs abound. We’ve had a long enough track record to see a new generation of savvy, experienced execs coming together to run startups.

And in these times, they are being tested as never before.

Biotech is going through quite a rough patch right now. For 2 years, practically anyone with a decent resume and some half-baked ideas on biotech could start a company and get it funded. The pandemic made it easy in many ways to pull off an IPO, with traditional road shows shut down in exchange for a series of quick Zoom meetings. Generalist investors flocked as the numbers raised soared into the stratosphere.

It looks like Warren Buffett is sticking to ice cream and railroads for the moment.

The billionaire CEO of Berkshire Hathaway backed out of two major holdings in the pharma industry, Forexlive first reported, including a $410 million investment in AbbVie and a $324.4 million stake in Bristol Myers Squibb.

The move comes after Berkshire abandoned its Teva shares just last quarter, Bloomberg reported.

Nearly a year ago, more than 200 workers at Novartis’ Grimsby, UK, facility were able to hang on to their jobs after the pharma closed a Switzerland site as a part of its workforce restructuring plan. Now, it looks like those employees’ time is up, as the site has been sold, Grimsby Telegraph reported today.

The manufacturing site has been sold to Humber Industrials, a subsidiary of International Process Plants. None of the current staff members will be working with the new owners, however.

Usually reserved for making decisions on drug applications or enforcing what Congress stipulates, the FDA is now dipping its toe into the wild world of congressional politics as it attempts to fix a major court decision that could have a chilling effect on rare disease R&D.

The case in question from last October saw a US appeals court overturn a prior FDA court win, saying that the agency never should’ve approved a rare disease drug because a previously approved but more expensive drug with the same active ingredient has orphan drug exclusivity barring such an approval.

When bluebird bio’s gene therapy to treat beta thalassemia won European approval in 2019, the nearly $2 million per patient price tag for the potential cure seemed like a surmountable hurdle.

Fast forward two years later, and bluebird has withdrawn Zynteglo, the beta thal drug, along with the rest of its gene therapy portfolio from Europe, which the company said is generally unwilling to pay a fair price for the treatment.