Michael Gilman and an ex­pe­ri­enced band of biotech vets are bust­ing out of stealth mode to­day with a start­up that marks the se­r­i­al en­tre­pre­neur’s third launch in 10 years. And he’s com­ing out in style, with a $38 mil­lion A round led by Canaan Part­ners.

Af­ter lit­er­al­ly stum­bling across the com­pa­ny while it was still in the white-board phase of de­vel­op­ment in 2015, Gilman says he was ripe for the chal­lenge and ad­ven­ture. And it’s a big one.

CSO and founder Russ Pet­ter has been hon­ing the bioin­for­mat­ics tools, as­says and chem­i­cal li­braries Ar­rakis Ther­a­peu­tics will need to cre­ate a plat­form tech­nol­o­gy that can be used to de­vel­op small mol­e­cules to in­hib­it dis­ease-caus­ing RNA.

This biotech has a long jour­ney ahead in pre­clin­i­cal work be­fore it can start try­ing this out in hu­mans. But if they’re right, the com­pa­ny will be on their way to work­ing on oral ther­a­pies that would be able to hunt down a host of what had been con­sid­ered un­drug­gable tar­gets — start­ing with an ini­tial aim at neu­rol­o­gy and can­cer.

Most pre­clin­i­cal star­tups like this come out of acad­e­mia. But this is a unique­ly Cam­bridge-based out­fit, bring­ing to­geth­er peo­ple with decades of ex­pe­ri­ence right in the heart of one of the world’s biggest biotech hubs.

“I’ve known Russ for a long time,” says Gilman, whose CV in­ter­sects with the founder’s stint at Bio­gen. “He ran chem­istry when I ran re­search there. He’s been work­ing on this for awhile.”

And Pet­ters isn’t the on­ly oth­er Bio­gen vet on board. Chief Busi­ness Of­fi­cer Daniel Ko­er­w­er and James Bar­soum, SVP of bi­ol­o­gy, al­so trace their ca­reers back to the Cam­bridge, MA gi­ant. Col­lec­tive­ly, they list stints at more than a dozen dif­fer­ent biotech com­pa­nies on their re­sumes.

Gilman crossed paths with Pet­ter in 2015, when the fel­low sci­en­tist was hatch­ing his plans for Ar­rakis — a com­pa­ny named af­ter the plan­et in Frank Her­bert’s Dune — in some shared of­fice space where Gilman had one of his board meet­ings. Pet­ter had had his in­ter­est whet­ted at a con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion on small mol­e­cules and RNA in­ter­ac­tions.

They talked, Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb de­cid­ed it would pay a hand­some price for Gilman’s last com­pa­ny, Pad­lock, and af­ter tak­ing last sum­mer off, they got down to se­ri­ous­ly ex­plor­ing the idea to­geth­er.

The mon­ey fol­lowed the ideas.

Along with Canaan Part­ners, Ad­vent Life Sci­ences, Pfiz­er, Cel­gene, Os­age Uni­ver­si­ty Part­ners, and biotech in­dus­try leader Hen­ri Ter­meer chipped in to the A round. The UK’s Ad­vent and Ter­meer helped seed the ini­tial work. And if Ar­rakis’ team is right, there will be plen­ty of op­por­tu­ni­ties along the way to set up plat­form col­lab­o­ra­tions and part­ner­ships.

Colleen Cuf­faro

“I was very in­trigued from the minute I heard the con­cept,” says Colleen Cuf­faro, a prin­ci­pal at Canaan who’s tak­ing a board spot at Ar­rakis.  “It has enor­mous po­ten­tial, how it opens up a whole new space for un­drug­gable tar­gets on our radar for a long time. I re­al­ly like the ap­proach of us­ing small mol­e­cules that are fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent than any oth­er RNA-tar­get­ing ap­proach I’ve seen. The oth­er piece was the team, a re­al­ly proven team, with a track record that is out­stand­ing.”

Gilman isn’t con­cen­trat­ing sole­ly on Ar­rakis. He’s been deeply in­volved with At­las Ven­ture, and they’re plan­ning an­oth­er com­pa­ny launch lat­er in the year. But Gilman isn’t stressed by the idea of helm­ing two ven­tures at once.

At Pad­lock, says Gilman, “I felt like I had ex­tra time on my hands.” Af­ter all, CEOs of star­tups of­ten “spend a lot of time wait­ing around for stuff to hap­pen.” And if you have the kind of team he’s work­ing with at Ar­rakis, it’s not a full-time job.

This is not Gilman’s first biotech rodeo. He knows first hand that a ven­ture-backed start­up of­ten lands in oth­er hands, as hap­pened with Stromedix and Pad­lock. This time around though, he would like to take it all out much fur­ther.

“You can nev­er rule it out,” he says, “but this is a com­pa­ny I would like to see built for the long haul. I tru­ly be­lieve we’ll have the ca­pa­bil­i­ty to crank out new drugs oth­er peo­ple haven’t been able to make.”

Gilman’s a long­time be­liev­er in the adage that in biotech, you should go big or go home.

Once again, he’s go­ing big.

89bio said its drug was better than placebo at lessening fibrosis without worsening nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, in two of three dose groups.

The San Francisco biotech said it thinks the Phase IIb data pave the way for a potential Phase III, following in the footsteps of another biotech in its drug class, Akero Therapeutics. To fund a late-stage study, CEO Rohan Palekar told Endpoints News 89bio “would need to raise additional capital,” with the company having about $188 million at the end of last year.

The National Institutes of Health has again declined to use so-called “march-in” rights to lower the price of Astellas and Pfizer’s prostate cancer drug Xtandi despite being invented at UCLA with grants from the US Army and NIH.

“Given the remaining patent life and the lengthy administrative process involved for a march-in proceeding, NIH does not believe that use of the march-in authority would be an effective means of lowering the price of the drug,” NIH told prostate cancer patients Robert Sachs and Clare Love, in a letter shared with Endpoints News. The institutes’ analyses found Xtandi “to be widely available to the public,” an indication that there was not a pressing need for the US to act.