Per­cep­tive Ad­vi­sors is one of those pro­lif­ic biotech in­vestor groups which has tra­di­tion­al­ly en­joyed ze­ro­ing in on clin­i­cal-stage in­vest­ments and crossover rounds, a group that prefers more es­tab­lished drug de­vel­op­ment play­ers with near-term pay­off po­ten­tial.

But now they’re part­ner­ing with Xon­toge­ny chief and long­time biotech en­tre­pre­neur Chris Garabe­di­an on a $210 mil­lion fund — with mon­ey con­tributed by in­sti­tu­tion­al in­vestors and fam­i­ly funds — to go in­to the launch space with their first ear­ly-stage VC fund. Dubbed the Per­cep­tive Xon­toge­ny Ven­ture Fund, LP, or just PXV Fund, they plan to fa­vor up­starts that Garabe­di­an is fos­ter­ing in his in­cu­ba­tor. But they’ll al­so plan to reach out­side that in­ner cir­cle for more A rounds to back, with plans to dom­i­nate ini­tial fund­ing with $10 mil­lion to $20 mil­lion per new­born biotech.

And they have a new start­up to un­veil to­day in the com­ing out par­ty. It’s called Quel­lis Bio­sciences, comes out of Virid­i­an and gets $17 mil­lion in PXV mon­ey to ad­vance undis­closed an­ti­bod­ies for undis­closed tar­gets. body tech,The biotech has a li­cense to use Xen­cor’s an­ti­body tech, de­signed to ex­tend their half life to re­duce dos­ing.

You can ex­pect a lot of the ear­ly mon­ey in to stay fair­ly well hid­den. As Garabe­di­an notes in an in­ter­view, they aren’t all go­ing to make it. So they’ll wait to be more forth­com­ing about some of these star­tups as they grow more as­sured of their po­ten­tial.

PXV has al­ready iden­ti­fied about half of the 8 to 10 com­pa­nies they plan to back out of fund 1. “I think this will go pret­ty quick­ly,’ says Garabe­di­an, who ex­pects the full $210 mil­lion to be com­mit­ted by late 2020 or ear­ly 2021. And once they’re done, they plan to ramp up fund 2.

Xon­toge­ny has pre­ferred a “more lean drug de­vel­op­ment ap­proach,” says Garabe­di­an, avoid­ing the big plays and cen­ter­ing on spe­cif­ic as­sets. And that suits Per­cep­tive just fine.

Per­cep­tive has large­ly stayed out of star­tups in the past be­cause “we don’t have peo­ple who have that ex­pe­ri­ence,” says Adam Stone, Per­cep­tive’s chief in­vest­ment of­fi­cer. But they do have a long­stand­ing re­la­tion­ship with Garabe­di­an, best known for his stint at the helm of Sarep­ta, who fills that hands-on role along with his team at Xon­toge­ny.

Stick­ing with an as­set-cen­tric ap­proach gives the new fund op­tions; M&A deals and part­ner­ing have been hot now for sev­er­al years for com­pa­nies get­ting to clin­i­cal proof of con­cept. IPOs have been run­ning steady as well. And if any of those win­dows close for a while, the part­ners ex­pect to be able to push through to when things pick back up again.

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order detailing how the federal government should help on-shore drug manufacturing — and the FDA will play a central role.

The agency now has three months to draw up the list of “essential medicines, medical countermeasures, and their critical inputs” that the US must have available at all times. Various departments and agencies are then directed to buy these drugs and their ingredients from American manufacturers.

Roche broke ground last year when they secured the first FDA approval for a checkpoint therapy in triple-negative breast cancer, a notoriously difficult-to-treat indication that has been passed over by the wave of targeted therapies.

Now, though, doctors are puzzling over why a combination of drugs meant to make that therapy more potent instead appeared to make it less effective.

Roche said Thursday that in a Phase III trial, combining their PD-1/L1 checkpoint therapy Tecentriq with the chemotherapy paclitaxel, did not significantly improve progression-free survival for patients with locally advanced or metastatic triple-negative breast cancer over giving those patients chemotherapy alone. In fact, patients on the Tecentriq-chemo arm had lower overall survival than patients on chemo, although the drugmaker cautioned that the trial was not powered for that endpoint and the data were immature.

The old AveXis team is moving quickly in Dallas.

Three months ago, they launched Taysha with $30 million in Series A funding and a pipeline of gene therapies out of UT Southwestern. Now, they’ve announced an oversubscribed $95 million Series B. And the biotech is declining all interview requests on the news, the kind of broad silence that can indicate an IPO is in the pipeline.

Biotechs, including those relatively fresh off launch, have been going public at a frenzy since the pandemic began. Investors have showed a willingness to put upwards of $200 million to companies that have yet to bring a drug into the clinic. Still, if Taysha were to go public in the near future, it would be perhaps the shortest path from launch to IPO in recent biotech memory.

The landmark cancer drug imatinib has been on the market since 2001, first sold by Novartis as Gleevec and in recent years as a generic. Now, a new Boston biotech is aiming to repurpose the drug as a treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension.

Aerovate emerged from stealth Thursday and announced a $72.6 million Series A, which will be used to develop and run trials for its candidate AV-101 — a dry powder version of imatinib meant to be used with an inhaler. The company emerged from RA Capital’s incubator and funding was led by Sofinnova.