Josh Resnick RA Cap­i­tal

Pe­ter Kolchin­sky and Raj Shah have an­oth­er $300 mil­lion-plus to play with on the biotech ven­ture side of their in­vest­ment busi­ness. 

The two an­nounced Mon­day morn­ing that they’ve put to­geth­er their first pure-play ven­ture fund at RA Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, which has been known to bet on just about every an­gle in health­care in­vest­ing — from rounds to fol­low-on in­vest­ments at pub­lic com­pa­nies. This new fund of theirs ar­rives well in­to a go-go era of new start­up fi­nanc­ing, with a par­tic­u­lar fo­cus on build­ing new biotechs.

The RA Cap­i­tal Nexus Fund closed at “just over” $300 mil­lion, they said in a state­ment. Add it to the rest of the mon­ey and their pri­vate deal ca­pac­i­ty jumps to $1 bil­lion, with $2.5 bil­lion un­der man­age­ment.

Nexus is ex­pect­ed to par­tic­i­pate in sub­stan­tial­ly all in­vest­ments in pri­vate com­pa­nies made by RA Cap­i­tal along­side its main, long­stand­ing fund, RA Cap­i­tal Health­care Fund L.P.

The out­spo­ken and oc­ca­sion­al­ly caus­tic Kolchin­sky is part­nered with an ur­bane and wide­ly-liked Shah. The co-heads of the ven­ture at RA are Josh Resnick and An­drew Levin, work­ing with 9 oth­er pro­fes­sion­als.

An­drew Levin RA Cap­i­tal

“The com­pa­nies RA Cap­i­tal ex­pects to build will range from sin­gle-as­sets to broad plat­forms, span­ning ear­ly dis­cov­ery through late clin­i­cal stage, across all ther­a­peu­tic ar­eas, such as neu­rol­o­gy, rare dis­or­ders, on­col­o­gy, and car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease,” said Levin in a pre­pared state­ment.

The group has been build­ing an in­cu­ba­tor with 19 projects and two star­tups to their cred­it. There are al­so ven­ture part­ner and ex­ec­u­tive-in-res­i­dence pro­grams to build up the bench.

So­cial im­age: Pe­ter Kolchin­sky and Raj Shah, RA Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.