Jamie Top­per Fra­zier Health­care Part­ners

The mon­ey in biotech keeps get­ting big­ger.

Af­ter Fra­zier Health­care Part­ners closed its first ded­i­cat­ed biotech fund with $262 mil­lion al­most ex­act­ly two years ago, man­ag­ing gen­er­al part­ner Jamie Top­per and his crew of VC spe­cial­ists went af­ter some 16 to 18 new biotech in­vest­ments, hew­ing to the start­up rounds that are their sweet spot — and which ac­counts for the bulk of the cash.

Now, they’re get­ting start­ed on their next pure-play fund with $419 mil­lion, giv­ing them sub­stan­tial­ly more mon­ey to bet on about the same num­ber of biotechs as be­fore.

“It’s our po­si­tion that the small­er funds tend to do bet­ter and I think his­tor­i­cal­ly that is true,” Top­per tells me. He thinks $400 mil­lion or so will do nice­ly at stay­ing man­age­able. But they al­so want to stack up well against the com­pe­ti­tion, and these days that calls for tak­ing a big­ger share of the eq­ui­ty in the port­fo­lio com­pa­nies they’re back­ing.

In Top­per’s view there are three key trends that dri­ve their in­vest­ment strat­e­gy.

1. Reg­u­la­to­ry is­sues are big, and while biotech re­mains one of the most heav­i­ly reg­u­lat­ed in­dus­tries in the world, the en­vi­ron­ment now — es­pe­cial­ly for on­col­o­gy and an­tibi­otics — is “in one of the most fa­vor­able spots it’s ever been in.”
2. Phar­ma has just as big an ap­petite as ever for tru­ly nov­el meds, so the fo­cus re­mains on those com­pa­nies look­ing to break new ground and get in­to the hands of the com­mer­cial groups that need them the most.
3. Drug pric­ing pres­sures con­tin­ue to grow, which is just an­oth­er rea­son to stick with the game chang­ers out there, where pay­ers are go­ing to be less like­ly to ex­pe­ri­ence stick­er shock.

It’s no sur­prise, then, to find Fra­zier part­ners lean­ing to­ward new drugs for can­cer and rare dis­eases, which fig­ure promi­nent­ly at the front of the food chain in biotech. They’re ac­tive in GI dis­eases and the liv­er, look­ing to score on the bets be­ing made on new NASH drugs. And when they can find the right ex­pe­ri­enced play­ers in CNS — as they did with the crew at Nau­rex spin-out Aptinyx — they’ll tread in that high-risk are­na as well.

Dan Estes

For Fra­zier, a good re­la­tion­ship can be the key to a hap­py in­vest­ment. And they’re able to reach out from of­fices in the Bay Area, Boston and San Diego to make that hap­pen with some of the most ex­pe­ri­enced play­ers in drug de­vel­op­ment.

“Half of what we do as a health­care VC is tal­ent re­cruit­ment,” he says. “Tal­ent is key.”

It’s al­so key in the VC. Dan Estes has been pro­mot­ed to full part­ner at Fra­zier to shoul­der a big­ger part of the load this time, and Top­per says he’ll make a cou­ple of new hires to broad­en the ded­i­cat­ed biotech group a lit­tle more.

Af­ter rais­ing more than $3 bil­lion in ven­ture mon­ey over the years, Fra­zier’s VCs have the lux­u­ry of work­ing with many of the re­peat en­tre­pre­neurs in the pack who have al­ready made mon­ey for the group. And they’re not too con­cerned about lo­ca­tion — they’ve gone to the Mid­west and Eu­rope when the com­pa­ny is right.

If it all lines up, Fra­zier will come to you.

Known in the in­dus­try as the Asia-Pa­cif­ic CRO, Novotech is now lead CRO ser­vices provider for the grow­ing num­ber of in­ter­na­tion­al biotechs se­lect­ing the re­gion for their stud­ies.

Re­flect­ing this Asia-Pa­cif­ic growth, Novotech staff num­bers are up 20% since De­cem­ber 2018 to 600 in-house clin­i­cal re­search peo­ple across a full range of ser­vices, across the re­gion.

Novotech’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties have been rec­og­nized by an­a­lysts like Frost & Sul­li­van, most re­cent­ly with the pres­ti­gious Asia-Pa­cif­ic CRO Biotech of the year award for best prac­tices in clin­i­cal re­search for biotechs for the fifth year. See oth­er awards here.

Re­gen­eron and their part­ners at Sanofi have beat the No­var­tis/Roche team to the punch on an­oth­er key in­di­ca­tion for their block­buster an­ti-in­flam­ma­to­ry drug Dupix­ent. The drug team scored an ac­cel­er­at­ed FDA ap­proval for chron­ic rhi­nos­i­nusi­tis with nasal polyps, mak­ing this the first such NDA for the field.

An­a­lysts have been watch­ing this race for awhile now, as Sanofi/Re­gen­eron won a snap pri­or­i­ty re­view for what is now their third dis­ease in­di­ca­tion for this treat­ment. And they’re not near­ly done, build­ing up hopes for a ma­jor fran­chise.

Two years af­ter MPM Cap­i­tal en­list­ed Chris Var­ma on its busy on­col­o­gy team, the for­mer en­tre­pre­neur-in-res­i­dence is un­veil­ing his first ven­ture project out of his new stomp­ing grounds in the Bay Area: Fron­tier Med­i­cines.

For Var­ma, who’s al­so co-found­ed Blue­print Med­i­cines and built com­pa­nies at Third Rock and Flag­ship, this marks an­oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ty to ap­ply some cut­ting-edge sci­ence to “sev­er­al of the most im­por­tant and dif­fi­cult tar­gets in can­cer” — tar­gets that oth­ers have tried to tack­le with more clas­si­cal meth­ods and failed. The launch round comes in at $67 mil­lion, which should go some way in scaf­fold­ing a pre­clin­i­cal pipeline and push one or more as­sets in­to the clin­ic three years from now, he tells me.

We’ve been wait­ing for the ar­rival of Bridge­Bio’s IPO to top off the wave of new biotech of­fer­ings sweep­ing through Nas­daq at the end of H1. And now we learn that it’s been sub­stan­tial­ly up­sized.

Ini­tial­ly pen­ciled in at a uni­corn-sized $225 mil­lion, the KKR-backed biotech has spiked that to the neigh­bor­hood of $300 mil­lion, look­ing to sell 20 mil­lion shares at $14 to $16 each. That’s an added 5 mil­lion shares, re­ports Re­nais­sance Cap­i­tal, which fig­ures the pro­posed mar­ket val­u­a­tion for Neil Ku­mar’s com­pa­ny at $1.8 bil­lion.

A fed­er­al judge has put a gener­ic chal­lenge to No­var­tis’ block­buster mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis drug Gilenya on hold while a patent fight plays out in court.

Judge Leonard P. Stark is­sued a tem­po­rary in­junc­tion ear­li­er this week, forc­ing My­lan, Dr. Red­dy’s Lab­o­ra­to­ries and Au­robindo Phar­ma to shelve their launch plans to al­low the patent fight to pro­ceed. He ruled that al­low­ing the gener­ics in­to the mar­ket now would per­ma­nent­ly slash the price for No­var­tis, even if it pre­vails.