News brief­ing: No­vo eyes the next ki­nas­es in a Finnish start­up; Boehringer In­gel­heim brings a bis­pe­cif­ic to the clin­ic

No­vo Seeds’ Jeroen Bakker thinks he’s found the next ki­nas­es.

The ear­ly stage, Eu­ro­pean VC firm an­nounced yes­ter­day they led a $9 mil­lion seed round for Rapp­ta Ther­a­peu­tics, a Finnish biotech de­vel­op­ing in­hibitors for an en­zyme called PP2A — pro­tein phos­phatase 2 — that Bakker thinks now hold the same kind of drug tar­get­ing po­ten­tial as ki­nas­es did two decades ago for can­cer.

“Since the in­tro­duc­tion of Gleevec, it’s al­ways been about ki­nas­es,” Bakker told End­points News, re­fer­ring to the best-sell­ing No­var­tis drug, first ap­proved in 2001. “But we’ve for­got­ten that phos­pho­tases are al­so im­por­tant.”

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