Near­ly two years af­ter draw­ing an $85 mil­lion Se­ries B, Shang­hai-based Har­bour Bio­Med has an­nounced a new large fund­ing round.

In what they’re billing as a “Se­ries B+,” Har­bour has raised $75 mil­lion to help push the biotech’s an­ti­bod­ies fur­ther in the clin­ic and de­vel­op more in-house can­di­dates. The round in­clud­ed new in­vestors such as SK Hold­ings, Greater Bay Area Fund and Efung Cap­i­tal, who joined re­turn­ing funds Leg­end Cap­i­tal, Ad­van­Tech and GIC, al­so known as Sin­ga­pore’s sov­er­eign wealth fund.

At­ul Desh­pande

“The lat­est fund­ing round is ac­tu­al­ly a con­tin­u­a­tion of the pre­vi­ous fund­ing round,” At­ul Desh­pande, Har­bour’s top US ex­ec­u­tive, told End­points News. “Many of these in­vestors were ac­tu­al­ly in­ter­est­ed in in­vest­ing in the B round, but due to var­i­ous rea­sons, they weren’t able to, so they came back to us and we ex­tend­ed the fund­ing to com­plete just a cou­ple weeks ago.”

Har­bour’s as­cent has been rapid, at least when mea­sured ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly. The com­pa­ny was found­ed by Jing­song Wang, the for­mer head of Sanofi’s Chi­na R&D who left the French drug­mak­er at the end of 2015 to con­sult for At­las Ven­tures. In 2016, he found­ed Har­bour Bio­Med in Shang­hai and, with ven­ture back­ing, pur­chased an At­las-backed com­pa­ny called Har­bour An­ti­bod­ies.

The At­las com­pa­ny, based in Cam­bridge and Rot­ter­dam, had de­vel­oped a plat­form of trans­genic mice and had been out-li­cens­ing it to biotechs and Big Phar­mas, in­clud­ing Pfiz­er and Eli Lil­ly. Wang thought he could turn that plat­form in­to an in-house pipeline, Desh­pande said. The move al­so in­stant­ly gave his Har­bour a foot­print on the three con­ti­nents — a foot­print the com­pa­ny hasn’t failed to play up.

Jing­song Wang

“Well, with op­er­a­tions in the US, EU and Chi­na, I be­lieve Har­bour Bio­Med is al­ready an MNC [mul­ti-na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tion], right?” Wang told Phar­ma Board­room last year, in re­sponse to a ques­tion about what Har­bour can do that mul­ti-na­tion­als like Sanofi can’t.

While de­vel­op­ing their in-house ca­pac­i­ty, Wang be­gan seek­ing as­sets that could be brought in­to the clin­ic more quick­ly. He inked an up-to $350 mil­lion deal on a PD-L1 with Chi­nese biotech Kelun, a col­lab­o­ra­tion with the South Ko­re­an biotech HanAll on a pair of an­ti­bod­ies for au­toim­mune and in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­eases, and a deal with Glen­mark (now Ich­nos) on a bis­pe­cif­ic for sol­id tu­mors. The two HanAll drugs quick­ly en­tered the clin­ic in three dif­fer­ent tri­als in Chi­na.

The new fund­ing will par­tial­ly go to fi­nanc­ing their first glob­al tri­al for their first in-house can­di­date. That drug, HBM4003, is a CT­LA-4 in­hibitor for ad­vanced sol­id tu­mors. It dif­fers from tra­di­tion­al CT­LA-4 drugs, such as Yer­voy, in that in­stead of con­sist­ing of four dif­fer­ent chains — the two light chains and two heavy chains that make up most an­ti­bod­ies — it on­ly has the heavy chains.

These an­ti­bod­ies are sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er than their cousin, Desh­pande said, and showed bet­ter ef­fi­ca­cy and safe­ty in pre­clin­i­cal mod­els than their con­ven­tion­al coun­ter­parts. The mech­a­nism be­hind that, though, is not com­plete­ly clear. The first tri­al, which just got FDA ap­proval to open sites in the US, will hope­ful­ly pro­vide a bet­ter an­swer.

“We don’t know yet,” Desh­pande said.

Now that Boehringer Ingelheim’s bet on contract manufacturing in China has paid off, the German drugmaker is anteing up more to get into the research game.

Boehringer has set aside $507.9 million (€451 million) for a new External Innovation Hub to be built in Shanghai over five years. The site will become one of its “strategic pillars” as the team strives to get 71 approvals — either for new products or indications — by 2030, said Felix Gutsche, president and CEO of Boehringer Ingelheim China.

Novartis has reached another large settlement to resolve misconduct allegations, agreeing to pay more than $678 million to settle claims that it had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lavish dinners, so-called speaking fees and expensive alcohol “that were nothing more than bribes” to get doctors to prescribe Novartis medications.

The top-shelf alcohol and lavish meals included a $3,250 per person night at Nobu in Dallas, a $672-per person dinner at Washington DC’s Smith & Wollensky and a $314 per person meal at Sushi Roku in Pasadena, according to the Justice Department complaint. There were at least 7 trips to Hooters and fishing trips in Alaska and off the Florida coast. Each of these events were supposed to be “speaker programs” where doctors educated other doctors on a drug, but the DOJ alleged many were “bogus” wine-and-dine events where the drug was barely mentioned, if at all.  (“Nobody presented slides on the fishing trips,” the complaint says.)

Four years after Switzerland’s Helsinn put $25 million of cash on the table for an upfront and near-term milestone to take MEI Pharma’s drug pracinostat into a long-running Phase III trial for acute myeloid leukemia, the partners are walking away from a clinical pileup.

The drug — an HDAC inhibitor — failed to pass muster during a futility analysis, as researchers concluded that pracinostat combined with azacitidine wasn’t going to outperform the control group in the pivotal.