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.

Neurologist and King’s College London professor Christopher Shaw has been researching neurodegenerative diseases like ALS and collaborating with drugmakers for the last 25 years in the hopes of pushing new therapies forward. But unfortunately, none of those efforts have come anywhere close to fruition.

“So, you know, after 20 years in the game, I said, ‘Let’s try and do it ourselves,’” he told Endpoints News. 

On the hunt for a better AAV capsid for gene therapy, Eric Kelsic’s Dyno Therapeutics has set itself apart with its focus on machine learning to help speed discovery. Now, Japanese drugmaker Astellas — fresh off a slate of gene therapy burns — is taking a bet on Dyno as it looks to the future.

Astellas and Dyno will work together as part of an R&D pact to develop next-gen AAV vectors for gene therapy using Dyno’s CapsidMap platform directed at skeletal and cardiac muscle, the companies said Wednesday. Under the terms of the deal, Dyno will design AAV capsids for gene therapy, while Astellas will be responsible for conducting preclinical, clinical and commercialization activities for gene therapy product candidates using the capsids.