Raze Ther­a­peu­tics, the Cam­bridge start­up that launched in 2014 with $24 mil­lion in sup­port, is call­ing it quits.

The com­pa­ny was look­ing to ad­vance a new class of can­cer ther­a­peu­tics that tar­get key meta­bol­ic path­ways, but it ap­pears the sci­ence wasn’t quite ready for prime time.

Bruce Booth

Seed­ed in part by At­las Ven­ture, the com­pa­ny was fo­cused on can­cer an­a­bol­ic me­tab­o­lism, specif­i­cal­ly mi­to­chon­dr­i­al one-car­bon en­er­get­ics. The space has emerged re­cent­ly as a ma­jor dri­ver of can­cer pro­lif­er­a­tion, sur­vival, and bio­mass ac­cu­mu­la­tion. But ap­par­ent­ly the tech was too tough to con­tin­ue.

“Al­though it made in­trigu­ing progress, the un­der­ly­ing can­cer me­tab­o­lism bi­ol­o­gy was too com­pli­cat­ed to war­rant fur­ther in­vest­ment,” wrote Bruce Booth, part­ner at At­las, in a re­cent port­fo­lio up­date.

Such is life in biotech. Yet a new start­up has emerged in its place: Kyn Ther­a­peu­tics. Backed in part by At­las (and ex­plor­ing a sim­i­lar space), Kyn an­nounced a $49 mil­lion Se­ries A round this morn­ing. The com­pa­ny is led by a Raze’s for­mer CSO Mark Man­fre­di, an At­las en­tre­pre­neur-in-res­i­dence.

When asked what hap­pened at Raze, Man­fre­di said the com­pa­ny still had as­sets and col­lab­o­ra­tions, but no longer em­ployed any­one.

Pe­ter Bar­rett

The com­pa­ny was co-found­ed and led by At­las’ Pe­ter Bar­rett, and its sci­en­tif­ic founders in­clud­ed Vam­si Mootha (The Howard Hugh­es Med­ical In­sti­tute, Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal), Josh Ra­bi­nowitz (Prince­ton), and David Saba­ti­ni (White­head/MIT).

Ac­cord­ing to Booth, Raze’s sci­en­tif­ic as­sets went back in­to acad­e­mia for fur­ther ex­plo­ration.

As concerns rise around the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines, global attention is increasingly turning to the little, 33-year-old, productless, bankruptcy-flirting biotech that could: Novavax.

In the now 16-month race to develop and deploy Covid-19 vaccines, Novavax has at times seemed like the pandemic’s most unsuspecting frontrunner and at times like an overhyped also-ran. Although they started the pandemic with only enough cash to last 6 months, they leveraged old connections and believers into $2 billion and emerged last summer with data experts said surpassed Pfizer and Moderna. They unveiled plans to quickly scale to 2 billion doses. Then they couldn’t even make enough material to run their US trial and watched four other companies beat them to the finish line.

The FDA wrapped up its inspection of Emergent’s troubled vaccine manufacturing plant in Baltimore on Tuesday, after halting production there on Monday. By Wednesday morning, the agency already released a series of scathing observations on the cross contamination, sanitary issues and lack of staff training that caused the contract manufacturer to dispose of millions of AstraZeneca and J&J vaccine doses.

For millions of Catholics around the world, the development of new vaccines to combat Covid-19 has sparked a moral dilemma. All the approved vaccines in use relied — in some fashion — on cell lines that were derived from aborted fetal tissue.

While church leaders accepted the vaccines and recommended their use to end the pandemic, a number also highlighted their preference for the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna over the J&J and AstraZeneca shots, which they noted were more heavily dependent on cell lines that they found morally objectionable.

Although Thursday’s Senate health committee hearing was focused on how foreign countries and adversaries might be trying to steal or negatively influence biomedical research in the US, the only country mentioned by the senators and expert witnesses was China.

Committee chair Patty Murray (D-WA) made clear in her opening remarks that the US cannot “let the few instances of bad actors” overshadow the hard work of the many immigrant researchers in the US, many of which have won Nobel prizes for their work. But she also said, “There is more the NIH can be doing here.”

Francesco De Rubertis made no secret of IPO plans for Centessa, his 10-in-1 legacy play. Barely two months later, the S-1 is in.

The hot-off-the-press filing depicts the same grand vision that the longtime VC touted when he did the rounds in February: Take the asset-centric mindset that he’s been preaching at Medicxi over the years, and roll up a bunch of biotech upstarts, with unrelated risk profiles, into 1 pharma company that can carry on the development at scale.