His way: Greg Ver­dine is build­ing a new kind of drug, with back­ing from a dif­fer­ent kind of in­vestor

Af­ter help­ing spear­head the launch of a long string of biotechs over the years from his pres­ti­gious perch at Har­vard, Greg Ver­dine is now de­vot­ing the bulk of his time to lead­ing the ef­fort on grow­ing two biotechs from scratch. And he’s just chalked up a $66 mil­lion round to move one of them — Fog­Phar­ma — in­to the clin­ic next year with a new tech­nol­o­gy he’s con­vinced can break its way in­to ther­a­peu­tic ter­ri­to­ries that have re­mained off lim­its to de­vel­op­ers up to now.

Fog­Phar­ma has been en­gi­neer­ing a new kind of ther­a­peu­tic class, one that com­bines the cell-pen­e­trat­ing ca­pac­i­ty of small mol­e­cules with the tar­get-en­gag­ing tenac­i­ty of bi­o­log­ics in­to what he calls CPMPs — cell pen­e­trat­ing minipro­teins. 

The big idea here — if you strip it all down to the chas­sis — is that Ver­dine and his crew have de­vel­oped a struc­tur­al “brace” that promis­es to make their polypep­tides ef­fec­tive against tough tar­gets like β-catenin. The brace — Ver­dine’s “se­cret sauce” — locks the struc­ture in place and amps up its abil­i­ty to pen­e­trate a cell, ze­ro in on the spe­cif­ic tar­get and main­tain a high lev­el of the drug in blood for a sus­tained pe­ri­od. And he says that each suc­ces­sive it­er­a­tion of their drugs in pre­clin­i­cal test­ing has proven bet­ter at the big job they’re de­signed for: drug­ging the un­drug­gable.

Leon Chen

This new mon­ey in the B round gives Fog­Phar­ma the op­por­tu­ni­ty to take its β-catenin pro­gram — which in­volves Wnt path­way ac­ti­va­tion — in­to a Phase I/II pro­gram in the sec­ond half of next year while lin­ing up an IND on a Cbl-b in­hibitor pro­gram, with a third undis­closed ef­fort com­ing up the line. The dis­cov­ery plat­form in­cludes “three ad­di­tion­al, dis­tinct and dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed forms of cell-pen­e­trat­ing minipro­teins.” 

“The en­tire fi­nanc­ing is three-and-a-half years worth of mon­ey,” Ver­dine tells me. Add that to the $11 mil­lion in Se­ries A cash raised at three sep­a­rate points be­gin­ning in ear­ly 2016, and Ver­dine has round­ed up a to­tal of $77 mil­lion for Fog­Phar­ma.

But it could have been more if he had need­ed it.

Ge Li

Much of the seed mon­ey for Fog­Phar­ma came from Deer­field and WuXi’s cor­po­rate fund, over­seen by Ge Li, a man with ac­cess to a vast amount of cap­i­tal around the world. That kind of fi­nanc­ing al­lowed Ver­dine to cre­ate Fog­Phar­ma with­out be­ing forced to adopt the short-term tac­tics of tra­di­tion­al VCs in the busi­ness.

“We built the com­pa­ny on a dif­fer­ent mod­el,” says Ver­dine. “I want­ed to do this one from soup to nuts. For that rea­son in the Se­ries A we didn’t turn to ven­ture in­vestors who would come in and have a sig­nif­i­cant role in build­ing the com­pa­ny.”

With­out even a hint of boast­ing, Ver­dine be­lieves that with his re­la­tion­ships among elite biotech in­vestors, at this point in his ca­reer of de­vel­op­ing new drugs, he could raise a bil­lion dol­lars if need­ed. There’s an ap­petite for tru­ly pi­o­neer­ing drug de­vel­op­ment work, says Ver­dine, that looks to vault ahead on crit­i­cal, break­through ther­a­pies.

He has the re­sume to back it up. And he’s built a plat­form com­pa­ny which has the ca­pac­i­ty to find and eval­u­ate new tar­gets and prospec­tive new ther­a­pies in a mat­ter of months.

Jeff Leerink

It’s no ac­ci­dent that Ver­dine’s lead pro­gram forms a junc­tion with check­point ther­a­pies; the β-catenin/Wnt path­way dis­rupts im­mune re­spons­es and an ef­fec­tive push here holds the promise of over­com­ing ini­tial re­sis­tance to im­munother­a­py as well as the de­vel­op­ment of drug re­sis­tance to an ef­fec­tive treat­ment. And it’s the first such ther­a­py to make it to the thresh­old of a clin­i­cal tri­al.

But Ver­dine is a proud pa­pa to mul­ti­ple pro­grams, and he is just as ex­cit­ed, if not more so, by the Cbl-b im­muno-on­col­o­gy drug that’s com­ing up be­hind the lead.

“What we’ve seen is that these mol­e­cules can be tol­er­a­ble at rel­a­tive­ly high dos­es, with a sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on tu­mor growth,” he says.

Kr­ish­na Yesh­want

Ver­dine has been a cel­e­brat­ed sci­en­tist in the field of drug dis­cov­ery for more years than many of his stu­dents have lived. Along the way, he’s earned some close ties to a new breed of biotech in­vestors who have now come in to back Fog­Phar­ma and well as his sec­ond ven­ture, LifeM­ine.

The sci­en­tist and se­r­i­al en­tre­pre­neur owes much of his suc­cess in rais­ing cash to close ties with Asian groups that have be­come ac­tive play­ers in biotech.

Rick Klaus­ner

Ver­dine’s ex­pe­ri­ence in Chi­na has led him to Boyu Cap­i­tal — an in­flu­en­tial pri­vate eq­ui­ty group led by co-founder and part­ner Sean Tong — and Blue Pool. The Chi­nese ven­ture group 6 Di­men­sions Cap­i­tal came in with oth­er new in­vestors, in­clud­ing Google’s GV, Hori­zons Ven­tures, Nan Fung Group and Leerink Part­ners. Deer­field Man­age­ment came back with Boyu Cap­i­tal, WuXi AppTec Cor­po­rate Ven­tures and “a promi­nent in­ter­na­tion­al group of non-in­sti­tu­tion­al in­vestors” to com­plete the syn­di­cate.

That kind of back­ing al­lowed Ver­dine to build his board with in­di­vid­u­als who are all in on his R&D strat­e­gy, with Leon Chen from 6 Di­men­sions, Leerink’s Jeff Leerink, GV gen­er­al part­ner Kr­ish­na Yesh­want and Rick Klaus­ner, a founder at Juno Ther­a­peu­tics, join­ing the group.

The new mon­ey will al­low Fog­Phar­ma to grow from 26 staffers to­day to north of 40 by the end of the year. And it’s still ear­ly days.

Has the mo­ment fi­nal­ly ar­rived for val­ue-based health­care?

RBC Capital Markets’ Healthcare Technology Analyst, Sean Dodge, spotlights a new breed of tech-enabled providers who are rapidly transforming the way clinicians deliver healthcare, and explores the key question: can this accelerating revolution overturn the US healthcare system?

Key points

Tech-enabled healthcare providers are poised to help the US transition to value, not volume, as the basis for reward.
The move to value-based care has policy momentum, but is risky and complex for clinicians.
Outsourced tech specialists are emerging to provide the required expertise, while healthcare and tech are also converging through M&A.
Value-based care remains in its early stages, but the transition is accelerating and represents a huge addressable market.

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It’s been almost a year since Siegall resigned from Seagen, the biotech he co-founded and led for more than 20 years, in the wake of domestic violence allegations by his then-wife. His eventual successor, David Epstein, sold the company to Pfizer in a $43 billion deal unveiled last week.

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The Beijing and North Carolina biotech commercially launched the treatment in China last July but is now axing the work and reverting resources to other “high-priority programs,” per a Friday update. The focus now is namely hepatitis B viral infection, postpartum depression and major depressive disorders.

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FDA ad­vi­sors unan­i­mous­ly rec­om­mend ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval for Bio­gen's ALS drug

A panel of outside advisors to the FDA unanimously recommended that the agency grant accelerated approval to Biogen’s ALS drug tofersen despite the drug failing the primary goal of its Phase III study, an endorsement that could pave a path forward for the treatment.

By a 9-0 vote, members of the Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee said there was sufficient evidence that tofersen’s effect on a certain protein associated with ALS is reasonably likely to predict a benefit for patients. But panelists stopped short of advocating for a full approval, voting 3-5 against (with one abstention) and largely citing the failed pivotal study.

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That failure in October wiped 80% from Relmada’s stock price, and was followed by another negative readout a few months later. In both cases, the company said that there had been trial sites that were associated with what it called surprising placebo effects that skewed the results compared with the drug, REL-1017.

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NK cell ther­a­py-fo­cused biotech eyes SPAC deal

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