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.

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.

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.

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.”

The world of radiopharmaceuticals has been heating up over the last few years, and Thursday saw another company focused on the field pull in a new nine-figure raise.

Germany’s ITM, or Isotopen Technologien München, scored a $109 million round of loan financing to push forward its precision oncology pipeline and fund late-stage development for its lead program. As part of the agreement, the loan will convert to shares in the event of future financial or corporate transactions, ITM said.