Lu­ca Santarel­li’s PhI­II is good to go, he has a new app to stop Covid-19 from in­fect­ing the da­ta and $110M to pave the way

Lu­ca Santarel­li bare­ly skipped a beat when he sold Ther­a­chon to Pfiz­er last year in an $810 mil­lion deal. The phar­ma gi­ant want­ed the biotech’s drug for dwarfism, and got it.

Santarel­li, mean­while, im­me­di­ate­ly spun out with a new com­pa­ny called Vec­tivBio, tak­ing their Phase II drug apraglu­tide for short bow­el syn­drome.

The Roche vet fo­cused on ex­e­cut­ing on the Phase II with a $35 mil­lion change­up round, and is now piv­ot­ing to Phase III with a mega-raise of $110 mil­lion. Still on the to-do list are new deals to beef up the very thin 1-drug pipeline with more rare dis­ease drugs. And he’s al­ready start­ing to lay the foun­da­tion for com­mer­cial­iza­tion work, an­tic­i­pat­ing that he can have reg­is­tra­tion da­ta in hand in ear­ly 2023.

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