A Mass­a­chu­setts start­up is walk­ing away from its lat­est fi­nanc­ing haul with over $100 mil­lion in fresh cash, thanks to an in­vestor syn­di­cate back­ing their pur­suit of pa­tient re­sponse tests.

The $110 mil­lion round for Sci­pher Med­i­cine was led by Cowen Health­care In­vest­ments, and in­cludes ex­ist­ing big-name back­ers North­pond Ven­tures and Khosla Ven­tures — bring­ing Sci­pher’s to­tal fundrais­ing to $227 mil­lion.

The au­toim­mune-fo­cused biotech, orig­i­nal­ly com­ing out of an aca­d­e­m­ic col­lab­o­ra­tion in 2015, touts a blood test re­leased in 2020 as its first phys­i­cal prod­uct. Sci­pher has been fo­cused on tak­ing datasets and iden­ti­fy­ing a pa­tient’s “dis­ease sig­na­ture” — which as CEO Alif Saleh told End­points News is a mea­sure of gene ex­pres­sion da­ta in whole blood.

That gene ex­pres­sion da­ta “ba­si­cal­ly tells you with our plat­form and our tech­nol­o­gy where the dis­ease bi­ol­o­gy sits,” Saleh said. “So we see us­ing gene ex­pres­sion da­ta where that bi­ol­o­gy sits, which then al­lows us to see if there’s a drug that tar­gets that par­tic­u­lar sig­na­ture, and if so, like­ly that the re­sponse is very high. If not, if the drug doesn’t tar­get the dis­ease sig­na­ture, then like­li­hood re­sponse is very low.”

There is al­so a sec­ond part to Sci­pher Med­i­cine: a pre­ci­sion med­i­cine da­ta busi­ness. As Saleh put it, test­ing gen­er­ates a lot of mol­e­c­u­lar and clin­i­cal da­ta, so they are build­ing a data­base of the da­ta they are col­lect­ing for au­toim­mune dis­eases, which they share through part­ner­ships with phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies in the drug dis­cov­ery process.

The com­pa­ny an­nounced one such col­lab­o­ra­tion with Gala­pa­gos back in 2020 — with Sci­pher find­ing drug tar­gets for in­flam­ma­to­ry bow­el dis­ease us­ing its plat­form, and Gala­pa­gos hav­ing the op­tion to take those tar­gets in­to fur­ther de­vel­op­ment, clin­i­cals and com­mer­cial­iza­tion.

The aca­d­e­m­ic col­lab­o­ra­tion be­hind Sci­pher was helmed by co-founders Joe Loscal­zo and Al­bert-Las­z­lo Barabasi, who is a physi­cist at North­east­ern Uni­ver­si­ty. Loscal­zo, chair of the De­part­ment of Med­i­cine and physi­cian-in-chief at Brigham and Women’s Hos­pi­tal, had been work­ing for years on map­ping the “hu­man in­ter­ac­tome,” the set of pro­tein-on-pro­tein in­ter­ac­tions with­in hu­man cells.

And that map­ping project be­came the ba­sis for Sci­pher, de­vel­op­ing pre­dic­tive drug re­sponse tests.

Sci­pher’s cur­rent prod­uct, known as Prism­RA, looks at pa­tient re­sponse for specif­i­cal­ly an­ti-TNF drugs, and the biotech orig­i­nal­ly start­ed look­ing at that par­tic­u­lar drug class for rheuma­toid arthri­tis, like drug sales king Hu­mi­ra, Rem­i­cade and En­brel.

And akin to the fi­nanc­ing: The large check will fund the launch of more tests from Sci­pher’s pipeline at one new test a year for the next five years. The next one, sched­uled to re­lease some­time this year, is Pris­mUC for ul­cer­a­tive col­i­tis. The CEO al­so said that ad­di­tion­al tests for Crohn’s dis­ease and MS were in the works.

An IPO is in the cards for the di­ag­nos­tics com­pa­ny mov­ing for­ward, but with the way that the mar­kets are, the com­pa­ny is in no rush to get there.

“We will go when the mar­kets are ready, and we are ready,” Saleh said.

Zoom can only go so far. And I think at this stage, we’ve all tested the limits of staying in touch — virtually. So I’m particularly happy now that we’ve revved up the travel machine to point myself to London for the first time in several years.

Whatever events we have lined up, we’ve always built in plenty of opportunities for all of us to get together and talk. For London, live, I plan to be right out front, meeting with and chatting with the small crowd of biopharma people we are hosting on October 12 at Silicon Valley Bank’s London headquarters. And there’s a lengthy mixer at the end I’m most looking forward to, with several networking openings between sessions.

Takeda on Tuesday morning made an announcement that almost 3,000 people with the rare disease known as hypoparathyroidism were fearing.

Due to unresolved supply issues and manufacturing woes, Takeda said it will cut its losses and discontinue its hypoparathyroidism drug, known as Natpara (parathyroid hormone), halting all manufacturing of the drug by the end of 2024, but the entire inventory will be available until depleted or expired, a company spokesperson said via email.

Valneva has secured €102.9 million (around $99.9 million USD) in a share offering to push forward its Pfizer-partnered Lyme disease vaccine and a jab for chikungunya that awaits an FDA decision.

The French vaccine maker largely snagged the near $100 million from Deep Track Capital and local state-owned Bpifrance, the company said Tuesday night. The capital injection is nearly equal to the amount Pfizer paid to nab equity in the company earlier this summer as part of the duo’s vaccine tie-up.