Bioreg­num Opin­ion Col­umn by John Car­roll

Back when Vi­vid­ion put to­geth­er its $82 mil­lion B round more than a year ago, I spec­u­lat­ed that the start­up was prob­a­bly gear­ing up for an IPO. That still hasn’t hap­pened, but they may be a lot clos­er af­ter to­day.

The ARCH- and Ver­sant-backed com­pa­ny just nailed down a $135 mil­lion raise from a dream team of crossover in­vestors, with Lo­gos Cap­i­tal and Box­er Cap­i­tal lead­ing as Soft­Bank jumps in with Avoro Cap­i­tal Ad­vi­sors, Black­Rock, RA Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, T. Rowe Price As­so­ci­ates, Sur­vey­or Cap­i­tal (a Citadel com­pa­ny), Wood­line Part­ners LP, Acu­ta Cap­i­tal and Driehaus Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment. Ex­ist­ing in­vestors ARCH Ven­ture Part­ners, BVF Part­ners L.P., Cas­din Cap­i­tal, Mubadala Cap­i­tal, Nex­tech In­vest and Ver­sant Ven­tures all came back to chip in.

“There was a lot of en­thu­si­asm for this raise,” CEO Jeff Hat­field tells me about the pipeline-build­ing raise for a com­pa­ny that has big am­bi­tions in on­col­o­gy as well as im­munol­o­gy. “It came to­geth­er very quick­ly and we bumped it up a cou­ple of times.”

Hat­field isn’t ready to flag an IPO, though — “Who knows what the fu­ture holds?” — but he’s a lot more forth­com­ing about the pre­clin­i­cal work they have un­der­way.

In-house work in­cludes a fo­cus on the KEAP1-NRF2 ax­is, with work un­der­way on NRF2 mu­tant and ad­dict­ed can­cers. NRF2 mod­u­lates stress in cells, ex­plains Hat­field, and once “mu­tat­ed it leads to a form of can­cer that is cur­rent­ly” un­ad­dressed by any ex­ist­ing ther­a­peu­tics. That gets to the com­pa­ny’s fo­cus on the broad range of dis­ease tar­gets still in un­chart­ed drug ter­ri­to­ry.

The com­pa­ny has spe­cial­ized in iden­ti­fy­ing lig­ands for unique pock­ets, al­low­ing them to drug pre­vi­ous­ly un­drug­gable pro­teins. The chair­man is Rich Hey­man, who built and sold Aragon and Ser­agon.

There is al­so a tran­scrip­tion fac­tor pro­gram they’re work­ing on with Bris­tol My­ers that Hat­field de­scribes as “one of a hand­ful of Holy Grail tar­gets in on­col­o­gy and im­munol­o­gy.” But that’s as far as he’s will­ing to go at this stage.

James Sabry

So how about that IPO?

Just this morn­ing we wrote up a sto­ry about Soft­Bank’s plan to in­ject bil­lions more in pub­lic biotechs, help­ing to push the stock boom that’s dri­ven up the Nas­daq biotech in­dex by 35% over the past year — and adding more cash to crossovers would ap­pear to fit in neat­ly with that strat­e­gy.

Since that B round Vi­vid­ion has struck a deal with Roche — the Big Phar­ma every­one likes to have on their R&D side — that de­liv­ered $135 mil­lion in cash plus mul­ti­ple bil­lions on the back end. That gave Roche a shot at E3 lig­as­es — which plays a role in pro­tein degra­da­tion, one of BD chief James Sabry’s fa­vorite sub­jects — as well as new on­col­o­gy and im­munol­o­gy pro­grams.

That all adds up to some promi­nent play­ers, world-class part­ners, a lot of cash on hand and the first snap­shot of the pre­clin­i­cal strat­e­gy — all key in­gre­di­ents fu­el­ing the IPO boom of the past year.

So we’ll see.

The EMA is putting EU member states on alert over the shortage of two drugs that counter heart attacks due to an uptick in demand.

On Friday, the EMA sent out a warning that two Boehringer Ingelheim drugs are experiencing a shortage: Actilyse and Metalyse. The drugs are used as emergency treatments for adults experiencing acute myocardial infarction, or a heart attack, by dissolving blood clots that have formed in the blood vessels.

Back in April, Amgen said it was encouraged by the solicitor general’s anticipated review of its Supreme Court petition to rehear a Repatha patent case. They’re likely much less optimistic about the outcome now.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a recent 27-page brief that Amgen’s arguments “lack merit and further review is not warranted.”

The case traces back to a suit filed in 2014 against Sanofi and Regeneron’s Praluent, which ended up beating Amgen’s PCSK9 blockbuster Repatha to market by a month just a year later.

Fujifilm’s CDMO arm, Fujifilm Diosynth, has been on a roll this month as the company has recently broken ground on a major project in Europe and it appears to be keeping up the momentum.

Fujifilm Diosynth announced that it has kicked off an expansion project for its microbial manufacturing facility at its campus in the town of Billingham, UK, in the northeast of England.

The 20,000 square-foot, £400 million ($435 million) expansion will add clean rooms, purification suites and a packing area along with more space for the manufacturing itself.