The world of biotech isn’t short on big per­son­al­i­ties, but it’s not ex­act­ly com­mon to see young pro­fes­sion­als earn­ing the broad re­spect of sea­soned aca­d­e­mics. Yet, Tom Cahill and his team at New­path have snagged the sup­port of some of biotech’s biggest names in just a few short years in ex­is­tence.

How did Cahill do it? He thinks big.

New­path Part­ners kicked off its sec­ond ven­ture fund Wednes­day, dubbed New­path Fund II, with $350 mil­lion to sup­port re­search from some of the best and bright­est re­searchers and se­r­i­al biotech en­tre­pre­neurs wait­ing in the wings.

Un­der Cahill’s lead­er­ship, New­path has plant­ed its flags in some of the biggest biotech launch­es in the past year, in­clud­ing the $315 mil­lion launch of Prime Med­i­cines in Ju­ly, the $500 mil­lion launch of Neumo­ra Ther­a­peu­tics and a $125 mil­lion launch for Chro­ma Med­i­cine last month.

Cahill, a Duke grad­u­ate with on­ly a few years in ven­ture cap­i­tal, has punched above his weight in as­sem­bling a who’s who list of aca­d­e­m­ic part­ners, in­clud­ing (but cer­tain­ly not lim­it­ed to) best­selling au­thor and Co­lum­bia re­searcher Sid­dhartha Mukher­jee, the Broad In­sti­tute’s gene edit­ing gu­ru David Liu and leg­endary Howard Hugh­es Med­ical In­sti­tute re­searcher Ron Vale.

One of those fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tors is Stu­art Schreiber, the famed co-founder of the Broad, who has worked with Cahill’s team launch­ing Ko­jin Ther­a­peu­tics in Ju­ly and build­ing the stealth biotech Kis­bee Ther­a­peu­tics. Get­ting backed by Schreiber, whose long shad­ow Cahill al­le­go­rized to End­points News as the “Genghis Khan of biotech” (he meant that in a nice way), is no mi­nor achieve­ment.

But Schreiber said Cahill’s pre­co­cious tal­ent in iden­ti­fy­ing the next sci­en­tif­ic break­through and his earnest mis­sion to make the world a bet­ter place has earned the trust of oth­er­wise jad­ed re­searchers who have been in and around the game for years.

“Tom Cahill is a force of na­ture and a sin­gu­lar­i­ty in many ways,” he said. “This is a guy who is all about val­ues, and he’s very in­ter­est­ed in dis­rup­tive ideas that are the right ideas. He has a vo­ra­cious ap­petite for things that if suc­cess­ful will change the world.”

In­deed, Cahill is many things — and sim­ple isn’t one of them. On our call, Cahill de­scribed the evo­lu­tion of biotech as part of a great sci­en­tif­ic pro­gres­sion dat­ing back to the Re­nais­sance. Where New­path fig­ures in­to that ex­pan­sive his­to­ry, Cahill says, is em­pow­er­ing the most for­ward-think­ing re­searchers to pur­sue the biggest pos­si­ble ideas, re­gard­less of tech­ni­cal chal­lenges or a prece­dent of fail­ure.

In short, he said: “We’re not here that long so let’s do some cool work.”

That dri­ve to help the best sci­ence have the best pos­si­ble chance at suc­cess means Cahill has been more than hap­py to col­lab­o­rate with oth­er ven­ture part­ners on dri­ving promis­ing com­pa­nies through stealth and be­yond. In two of the three ex­am­ples cit­ed above, Cahill’s team worked close­ly with Bob Nelsen’s out­fit at Arch Ven­ture — a fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor — which Cahill de­scribed as like-mind­ed in terms of dri­ving the next gen­er­a­tion of biotech. Nelsen him­self is known as a per­son­al­i­ty in the world of biotech, and his work both at Arch and dis­rup­tive man­u­fac­tur­ing out­fit Re­silience has caught more than a few eyes through­out the years.

With $350 mil­lion to play with, Cahill said the plan is to seed or fi­nance five more star­tups out­side of the four that are cur­rent­ly in the works, in­clud­ing his team’s work with Schreiber on Kis­bee. In terms of what those com­pa­nies are work­ing on? We’ll have to wait and see.

But Cahill did of­fer a bit of in­sight in­to what ar­eas in­ter­est him, in­clud­ing neu­ropsy­chol­o­gy, which he called the dis­ease ar­eas of the next 10 years, and de­liv­ery tech. If you’ve been fol­low­ing along with biotech the past cou­ple years, you will have no­ticed that neu­ro­science has seen a resur­gence among drug de­vel­op­ers as long sought-af­ter drug tar­gets have sud­den­ly shown promise with the rise of new ther­a­peu­tic modal­i­ties.

So where will Cahill go next? Stay tuned to find out.

Eli Lilly has succeeded in its attempt to get the first non-covalent version of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, or BTK, inhibitors to market, pushing it past rival Merck.

The FDA gave an accelerated nod to Lilly’s daily oral med, to be sold as Jaypirca, for patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma.

The agency’s green light, disclosed by the Indianapolis Big Pharma on Friday afternoon, catapults Lilly into a field dominated by covalent BTK inhibitors, which includes AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s Imbruvica, AstraZeneca’s Calquence and BeiGene’s Brukinsa.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) voted unanimously in favor of “harmonizing” Covid vaccine compositions, meaning all current vaccine recipients would receive a bivalent vaccine, regardless of whether they’ve gotten their primary series.

The vote marks an effort to clear up confusion around varying formulations and dosing schedules for current primary series and booster vaccines, as well as “get closer to the strains that are circulating,” according to committee member Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.