The ven­ture in­vestors at Medicxi are fund­ing a pair of biotech spin­outs from UK-based So­sei Hep­tares, which has been fine tun­ing its ex­per­tise in G pro­tein-cou­pled re­cep­tors for a num­ber of years now.

Francesco De Ru­ber­tis

Medicxi is of­fer­ing €40 mil­lion to kick­start two new com­pa­nies — the twins Orex­ia and In­ex­ia, which will tar­get Orex­in OX1 and OX2 for neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­eases. The Hep­tares sub­sidiary will put its re­searchers to work on the two projects, iden­ti­fy­ing nar­colep­sy as one key dis­ease on the menu.

Orex­ins are well known tar­gets in the biotech world. These neu­ropep­tides are in­volved in the reg­u­la­tion of sleep, wake­ful­ness and ap­petite.

Mal­colm Weir

Medicxi part­ner Francesco De Ru­ber­tis will sit on the board to watch over the firm’s in­vest­ment. Both of these groups have deep roots in the UK, with So­sei look­ing to build up the Hep­tares op­er­a­tion un­der Mal­colm Weir.

The VC’s cash should be enough to get through proof-of-con­cept stud­ies, fit­ting neat­ly in Medicxi’s as­set-cen­tric fo­cus, which of­ten fo­cus­es the mon­ey on ear­ly-stage re­search pro­grams stripped of as much over­head as they can.

J&J has zeroed in on a Covid-19 vaccine candidate that it hopes to begin testing in humans by September this year — with the extraordinary goal of getting it ready for emergency use in early 2021. And together with BARDA, it’s committing $1 billion to make it happen.

That kind of accelerated timeline would fall on the fast side of NIAID director Anthony Fauci’s well-publicized prediction that it would be another 12 to 18 months before a vaccine can be available for public use. A Phase I trial of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine began two weeks ago, and both the biotech and fellow mRNA player CureVac have discussed similar, if not even faster, timelines for emergency use among healthcare workers.

Using lab-grown proteins that are engineered to mimic the architecture of viruses to induce an immune response, VBI Vaccines is joining the hunt for a coronavirus vaccine — harnessing technology that has initially been proved safe in early trials as a prophylactic for cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection.

Unlike the raft of the companies in the Covid-19 vaccine race — including Moderna, CureVac and J&J — VBI is taking a pan-coronavirus approach, by developing a vaccine that will encompass Covid-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

VCs love few things more than a proven executive team when it comes to launching a new company. And now a group of A-listers has turned to a pair of top execs out of AveXis to steer the latest gene therapy player into the clinic.

The biotech is Waltham, MA-based Affinia and the two execs are Sean Nolan and Rick Modi — the former CEO and CBO respectively of AveXis, the gene therapy pioneer that fetched $8.7 billion in a sale to Novartis. Nolan has now taken the chairman’s role at Affinia while Modi moves up to the CEO post at the company.

When Pieter van der Meer started raising the capital for Gilde Healthcare’s fifth fund in the waning months of 2019, he had his eyes on a different chain of events that could change the healthcare system and perhaps even play to his firm’s advantage: The US presidential election.

Since raising their third fund in 2011, the 34-year-old Dutch firm had focused on value-based care. They chose late-stage biotechs that came up with new devices and delivery systems for de-risked established compounds, and when they chose preclinical biotechs, they spoke with potential pharma partners, payers and regulators to ask where and at what prices the drug made sense. As the Democratic primary became a contest over how to lower healthcare costs, it looked like a strategy that could pay off.