Or­chard $OR­TX. Seres $MCRB. Ret­roSense (ac­quired by Al­ler­gan). With sev­er­al high pro­file ex­its un­der their belt, 4BIO Cap­i­tal is out to find more trail­blaz­ers to back in the drug R&D world.

The VC shop has raised $50 mil­lion in the first close of what it hopes to be a $150 mil­lion sec­ond fund at the end of next year. With a fo­cus on ad­vanced ther­a­pies — cell and gene ther­a­py, RNA-based ther­a­py, tar­get­ed ther­a­py, and the mi­cro­bio­me — they will de­vote 60% of the fund to Eu­ro­pean deals from their perch in Lon­don, while spread­ing the rest be­tween Japan and the US, go­ing in­to the Mid­west and the South for promis­ing ideas that might not have re­ceived as much love as those com­ing out of Boston.

Al­to­geth­er, 8 to 12 pri­vate com­pa­nies will re­ceive in­vest­ment from 4BIO Ven­tures II.

“With the gap in re­al com­mer­cial de­vel­op­ment of ad­vanced ther­a­pies over the last 20 years, there’s a lot of pro­grams, par­tic­u­lar­ly here in Eu­rope, that aca­d­e­mics have been sol­dier­ing on, on a shoe­string bud­get, push­ing their ideas and thoughts to a point where they can be in the clin­ic with­in a year, par­tic­u­lar­ly if they don’t suf­fer from the bot­tle­neck of man­u­fac­tur­ing,” Owen Smith, di­rec­tor of in­vest­ment, told End­points News.

While many suc­cess­es in ad­vanced ther­a­pies have been lim­it­ed to rare con­di­tions, main­ly of the reti­na, liv­er and bone mar­row — 4BIO wants to start tak­ing these cut­ting edge ap­proach­es to slight­ly more main­stream ap­pli­ca­tions, man­ag­ing part­ner Dmit­ry Kuzmin said.

“Our am­bi­tion for…Fund II is to try and bring these in­to what we jok­ing­ly call medi­um rare con­di­tions, and ba­si­cal­ly where we have to tack­le with treat­ing tens of thou­sands of pa­tients on a reg­u­lar ba­sis,” he said.

Hav­ing been at the fore­front of ad­vanced ther­a­pies in­vest­ment since 2010, the team of 9 (bol­stered by a 6-mem­ber ad­vi­so­ry board) is clear about just the kind of fron­tiers it’s keen on tack­ling in each of the fields it’s watch­ing, Kuzmin added.

That means gene ther­a­py in the brain, as well as ways to tone down, crank up or turn off gene ther­a­pies (4BIO has pre­vi­ous­ly in­vest­ed in op­to­ge­net­ics start­up Ret­roSense, but there’s al­so chemo­ge­net­ics, ther­mo­ge­net­ics, mag­ne­to­ge­net­ics, and so on).

With­in cell ther­a­py, 4BIO is look­ing for sol­id clin­i­cal and man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tions that can de­liv­er con­sis­tent and durable re­spons­es; for tar­get­ed ther­a­py it’s most in­ter­est­ed in pro­tein degra­da­tion and vi­ral ap­pli­ca­tions; and “ra­tio­nal en­gi­neer­ing” is the key word for their mi­cro­bio­me bets.

The LPs, which in­clude the Chil­dren’s Min­neso­ta among a group of fam­i­ly of­fices and in­sti­tu­tion­al in­vestors, have man­dat­ed a third of the fund be re­served to launch new star­tups.

Kuzmin en­vi­sions most­ly seed-stage and Se­ries A rounds, with the oc­ca­sion­al Se­ries B — and the more ad­vanced in clin­i­cal proof-of-con­cept, the bet­ter. “Our ide­al project is clear­ly a for­ma­tion deal that’s al­ready in the clin­ic,” he summed up.

Ex­pect some more de­tails soon on the com­pa­nies they reck­on are push­ing through the med­i­cines of to­mor­row as the first two in­vest­ments get un­der way.

Gene therapy pioneer James Wilson spearheaded animal studies demonstrating the potential of new treatments injected directly into the brain, looking to jumpstart a once-and-done fix for an extraordinarily rare disease called GM1 gangliosidosis in infants. His team at the University of Pennsylvania published their work on monkeys and handed it over to Passage Bio, a Wilson-inspired startup building a pipeline of gene therapies — with an IND for PBGM01 to lead the way.

After 13 years on Nasdaq, Cellular Biomedicine Group is returning to private hands.

CEO Tony (Bizuo) Liu is a key advocate of the deal, leading a consortium of mostly Chinese investors including other top company execs, Yunfeng Capital and TF Capital — even as the company is getting more entrenched in the US with its CAR-T and other cell therapy work.

Shareholders are receiving $19.75 per share $CBMG, which translates to a premium of 31.4% over the 30 trading-day average price as of August 11. The stock, though, has dropped significantly since the consortium first put in its proposal in November. Compared to then, the acquisition price marks only a 11.8% increase.

Does precision medicine work?

The approach, based on finding a drug to target a patient’s specific genes, has undoubtedly saved individual lives, spurring Lazarus-like reversals in health in once-terminally ill patients. But critics have pointed out that its pursuit has meant drug companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars to target mutations that affect narrow slices of the populations, and that many of the gains researchers thought it would bring have eroded as cancers evolve resistance.

Webster, MA-based real estate developer Galaxy Life Sciences struck a roughly $50 million deal to build in a biomanufacturing park in Worcester, an up-and-coming biotech hotspot about an hour west of Boston.

Galaxy paid $1.9 million for a 6-acre plot, on which it intends to construct a $50 million building grossing 95,000 to 180,000 square feet. The space will be designed to accommodate research and development, or manufacturing, and could employ 125 to 150 workers, according to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. Construction is expected to begin this spring and wrap up in about a year.

After abruptly shutting down three hemophilia studies back in March due to serious safety issues, Novo Nordisk is getting things going again.

The Danish pharma gave the go-ahead to resume Phase III trials for its concizumab candidate, which are investigating subcutaneous prophylaxis treatment in hemophilia A and B patients regardless of inhibitor status. Novo Nordisk had halted the studies after three patients experienced non-fatal blood clots.