Back in 2019, GHO Cap­i­tal Part­ners claimed it closed the biggest-ever pri­vate eq­ui­ty fund fo­cused on Eu­ro­pean health­care, rais­ing a mam­moth $1 bil­lion-plus. Now the firm is clos­ing its next fund with dou­ble that amount.

GHO Cap­i­tal raised $2 bil­lion-plus un­der its third fund, GHO Cap­i­tal III, which is clos­ing less than four months af­ter en­ter­ing the mar­ket, the firm said on Tues­day. The fund, which drew sup­port from both new and old in­vestors, blew past GHO’s ini­tial tar­get of about $1.47 bil­lion (€1.25 bil­lion).

“We have seen un­prece­dent­ed deal ac­tiv­i­ty in our port­fo­lio and the sec­tor at large,” GHO part­ners said in a state­ment. “Our pipeline is more ac­tive now than ever be­fore.”

Since it was found­ed in 2014, GHO has pumped around $2.9 bil­lion (€2.5 bil­lion) in­to 14 plat­form com­pa­nies in the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, medtech, pa­tient ser­vices and out­sourced ser­vices space. That in­cludes ac­tive phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­gre­di­ent (API) de­vel­op­er Ster­ling Phar­ma So­lu­tions and the oph­thalmic-fo­cused VI­S­U­far­ma. The firm says it pri­or­i­tizes com­pa­nies that “en­able bet­ter, faster and more ac­ces­si­ble health­care.”

Fol­low­ing sev­er­al strong years, bio­phar­ma ac­tiv­i­ty in­creased in Eu­rope amid the pan­dem­ic, a 2020 re­port by Bain & Com­pa­ny sug­gests. Last year saw a to­tal of 35 deals, up from 24 in 2019, ac­cord­ing to the re­port.

“The pan­dem­ic has served to high­light the strong, sec­u­lar sec­tor tail­winds that guide GHO’s in­vest­ment the­sis: an ever-grow­ing need for bet­ter, faster, more ac­ces­si­ble health­care,” the part­ners said.

In ad­di­tion to the fund, GHO has added 12 new team mem­bers in the last year and a half, and is now open­ing a US of­fice in Re­search Tri­an­gle Park, NC, which it hopes will ac­cel­er­ate growth op­por­tu­ni­ties for Eu­ro­pean busi­ness­es in­to North Amer­i­can mar­kets.

GHO is run by three man­ag­ing part­ners: Mike Mor­timer, a for­mer Quin­tiles ex­ec­u­tive; Alan MacK­ay, who served as a se­nior part­ner at 3i Group; and An­drea Pon­ti, who pre­vi­ous­ly was with JP Mor­gan.

So­cial im­age: Shut­ter­stock

Amid burgeoning efforts to create a new type of cell therapy out of regulatory T cells — whether by channeling or blocking their immunosuppressive power — Quell Therapeutics wants to shoot for a first.

If everything goes well, the Syncona-backed biotech will be in the clinic early next year, marking what it calls the historic feat of dosing a patient with a CAR-Treg with multiple edited genes.

In the same way that the FDA signs off on flu vaccines every year without requiring large clinical trials to measure their efficacy, the FDA may employ a similar strategy in authorizing variant-focused versions of the mRNA vaccines.

As the world braces for more data on the latest variant Omicron, which may reduce vaccine efficacy, top vaccine developers like Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have promised they can pull together a new vaccine targeted against a specific Covid variant in about 100 days. Since Omicron emerged last week, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and J&J have all said they’ve begun work on Omicron-specific vaccines, if needed.

HotSpot Therapeutics, the allostery-focused biotech that works on what it calls “natural hotspots” — hence the name — is getting a bit hotter in its valuation from investors. And to that end they’ve raised $100 million.

The four-year-old AI computational biotech started by two former Nimbus execs announced this morning that it closed its Series C round right at the line of a 9-figure investment, courtesy of some big investors.