An­ten­gene had Cel­gene writ­ten all over its brand. Its founder and CEO, Jay Mei, was the big biotech’s ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment in hema­tol­ogy/on­col­o­gy for eight years be­fore launch­ing his own start­up in Chi­na with his for­mer em­ploy­er as a part­ner and in­vestor. Cel­gene chipped in­to An­ten­gene’s $120 mil­lion round last year, and just days ago, it al­so wooed Cel­gene’s Chi­na gen­er­al man­ag­er to be its chief busi­ness of­fi­cer.

You can add one more promi­nent il­lus­tra­tion to the list. In one of his first moves since sell­ing Cel­gene to Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb for $74 bil­lion, for­mer CEO Mark Alles is join­ing An­ten­gene’s board of di­rec­tors.

“Mark brings out­stand­ing gov­er­nance and com­mer­cial ex­pe­ri­ence that will help pro­mote our de­vel­op­ment and com­mer­cial strat­e­gy in Chi­na, the Asia Pa­cif­ic re­gions and the rest of the world,” Mei said in a state­ment.

While he was still work­ing for the New Jer­sey biotech, Mei had ac­com­pa­nied Alles on a trip to Bei­jing to meet with John Oyler re­gard­ing an as­set swap deal that would see BeiGene mar­ket­ing some of Cel­gene’s can­cer drugs in Chi­na, in ex­change for a made-in-Chi­na PD-1 (which they even­tu­al­ly dropped). In fact, he re­calls the ex­act date they met: May 14, 2016.

That part­ner­ship ce­ment­ed BeiGene’s sta­tus as a pi­o­neer­ing US-Chi­na biotech act­ing as a bridge be­tween Amer­i­can in­no­va­tion and the vast Chi­nese mar­ket, con­tribut­ing their share of R&D work along the way. Mei counts An­ten­gene, based in Shang­hai and Philadel­phia, as a mem­ber of this camp — con­sist­ing of hy­brids that work like a multi­na­tion­al drug­mak­er but un­der­stand the do­mes­tic mar­ket deeply.

“In fact I of­ten say Chi­na is a coun­try with three worlds,” he told re­porters at the End­points-Pharm­Cube BI­IS con­fer­ence in late 2018. “[Shang­hai] is in the heart of the first world; you dri­ve an hour or two and it might be the sec­ond world; dri­ve three to four hours and you ar­rive at the third world. Chi­na is very com­plex.”

But the coun­try has gone a long way in em­brac­ing emerg­ing biotechs from over­seas — speed­ing up reg­u­la­to­ry process­es and ap­provals dras­ti­cal­ly — as well as nur­tur­ing its own.

“Ten years ago when I first came to Chi­na to in­tro­duce Cel­gene’s prod­ucts, the ex­perts had heard of our drugs be­cause they’d been to ASH and AS­CO,” Mei re­called. “But no­body had heard of the com­pa­ny.”

Thanks in part to Alles’ busi­ness de­vel­op­ment strate­gies, that is no longer the case. And the in­dus­try vet, who’s al­so tak­en a board role at Sy­ros, said he’s now ex­cit­ed to bring all that ex­pe­ri­ence to An­ten­gene now that it’s ever clos­er to com­mer­cial­iza­tion.

The first an­tic­i­pat­ed launch would be of se­linex­or, or ATG-010, a con­tro­ver­sial mul­ti­ple myelo­ma drug li­censed from Karyopharm. Al­so work­ing to­ward that goal is new CBO John Chin, who spent 15 years with Cel­gene and was cred­it­ed for man­ag­ing the Revlim­id fran­chise.

A couple months after raising CHF 2.5 million ($2.76 million) in initial seed funding, one-year-old Araris Biotech is topping off the round with another CHF 12.7 million ($14 million).

The Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich spinout now has CHF 15.2 million to work with, and CEO Philipp Spycher has big plans. He hopes to bring one of the company’s antibody-drug conjugates (ADC) to the clinic by late 2022 or early 2023. “It’s very, very ambitious, but we are very optimistic that we actually can make it,” he said.

Four years after a Phase I/II setback in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), Novartis is hoping its drug branaplam will find more success in a new neurological indication: Huntington’s disease.

The decision was announced a year after the head of research, Jay Bradner, said he did not see a “big opportunity” in SMA, according to Reuters. Novartis says it has preclinical data showing that branaplam reduces levels of mutant huntingtin protein, and SMA data showing patients on the drug had reductions in huntingtin mRNA. The FDA gave branaplam their orphan drug designation, and Novartis plans to move forth with a Phase IIb trial next year.

One of GlaxoSmithKline’s big projects at its global vaccine R&D center in Rockville, MD is set to enter Phase III after passing early-stage tests with flying colors.

Eyeing the wide-open respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) space, GSK is pushing two different vaccine candidates: GSK3888550A is designed to confer protection to infants via maternal immunization, while GSK3844766A is meant for the elderly.