Joe Jimenez forges an­oth­er big-mar­ket, small-cash deal, lin­ing up a kid­ney dis­ease drug for his lat­est port­fo­lio start­up

Ex-No­var­tis CEO Joe Jimenez and his part­ner Mark Fish­man put to­geth­er a $133 mil­lion fund to back their play at Adi­tum, look­ing to add se­lect drugs for a line­up of sub­sidiary op­er­a­tions with po­ten­tial to con­quer big mar­ket dis­eases.

But they aren’t splash­ing the cash around.

Tues­day morn­ing Jimenez and Fish­man put out word that they had parceled out a low-ante up­front of $2 mil­lion to bag a Phase II-bound, an­ti-in­flam­ma­to­ry Nrf2 drug from vTv Ther­a­peu­tics af­ter it had com­plet­ed 2 Phase I tri­als — which ev­i­dent­ly proved the drug is tol­er­a­ble to pa­tients. There’s an­oth­er $151 mil­lion in mile­stones on the ta­ble, but that stretch­es all the way through com­mer­cial.

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