The sea­soned crew at Ja­co­bio has raised $174.1 mil­lion on its HKEX de­but, fu­elling a pipeline an­chored by two Ab­b­Vie-part­nered al­losteric SHP2 in­hibitors.

It’s sig­nif­i­cant­ly less than what the biotech was ru­mored to be seek­ing back in Au­gust — Bloomberg’s sources said it could be as much as $400 mil­lion — but Qim­ing, which has backed the biotech since its Se­ries A, was hap­py about how it went from found­ing to IPO in just five years. At 12.34%, Qim­ing owned the largest chunk of stock in Ja­co­bio.

Yinx­i­ang Wang

Ja­co­bio has po­si­tioned it­self firm­ly with­in an emerg­ing group of Chi­nese up­starts with the lofty am­bi­tion to on­ly de­vel­op in-house drugs that are first-in-class across the globe. That means no in-li­cens­ing and no me-too or me-bet­ter prod­ucts — the two strate­gies that many of its bet­ter-known coun­ter­parts were built on.

The top team com­pris­es CEO Yinx­i­ang Wang, R&D chief Shao­jing Hu and pres­i­dent of ad­min­is­tra­tion Jiessie Wang. The trio worked to­geth­er at Bet­ta Phar­ma, a Shen­zhen-list­ed biotech that de­vel­oped and now mar­kets an epi­der­mal growth fac­tor re­cep­tor in­hibitor called ico­tinib.

Like much of the in­dus­try, though, can­cer and au­toim­mune dis­ease loom large in the port­fo­lio, with an ad­di­tion­al fo­cus on in­fec­tious dis­eases. To full flesh out the treat­ments, Ja­co­bio has set up a sub­sidiary and a joint ven­ture.

Aside from the SHP2 drugs, there’s al­so JAB-3068, which in­hibits an en­zyme be­lieved to play a role in sev­er­al blood can­cers called PTPN11. The idea is that it can work down­stream for PD-1 check­points and lift im­muno­sup­pres­sion in the tu­mor mi­croen­vi­ron­ment.

Oth­er in­vestors in­clude Hill­house, Lil­ly Asia Ven­tures and Tai­wan’s Cen­ter Lab­o­ra­to­ries.

Little capsules of peanut powder drove Nestlé’s $2.6 billion buyout of Aimmune. Now, with $40 million in new funding, a fledgling biotech is promising to bring a more sophisticated version of that protein therapy that can go much, much further.

Ukko’s goal is two-pronged — with the initial products spanning therapeutic and food — but it’s grounded in the same protein engineering platform, co-founder and CEO Anat Binur told Endpoints News.

Behind the seemingly simple concept of targeted cancer therapies is the drug developer’s headache that the target is always changing. Each generation of kinase inhibitors may be ostensibly hitting the same oncogene, but in addition to blocking the wildtype oncogene, they must now also address the mutations that have developed along the way, spurring resistance to current drugs.

The more those target kinases evolve, too, the more they could resemble off-target kinases you don’t want to bind. So each iteration requires more selectivity — sometimes down to differences of a few atoms.

Years after co-founding SINE-focused Karyopharm and stirring up controversy at MD Anderson, Ronald DePinho is helping uncloak a new biotech targeting solute carrier transporter proteins — and Karyopharm’s former head of chemistry is leading the charge.

Nirogy Therapeutics emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with a $16.5 million Series A round and plans to hit the clinic by 2022. The financing should be enough to carry the startup’s lead program, a small molecule lactate transport inhibitor, through Phase I, CEO Vincent Sandanayaka said.