A Bei­jing-based rare dis­ease and on­col­o­gy play­er has raised $98 mil­lion to help fund the ex­pan­sion of its pipeline as well as a com­mer­cial port­fo­lio.

CAN­bridge put out word Tues­day that the glob­al pri­vate eq­ui­ty play­er Gen­er­al At­lantic joined forces with Chi­nese CRO Wuxi AppTec to lead the Se­ries D, with both ready to chip in an ex­tra $10 mil­lion each un­der the right con­di­tions. The syn­di­cate in­cludes RA Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, Hud­son Bay Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, Yuan­Ming Pru­dence Fund and Tigermed.

The new in­fu­sion sets CAN­Bridge up for an IPO in a year or two, ac­cord­ing to CFO Glenn Has­san.

A spe­cial­ist in rare ge­net­ic dis­eases, CAN­bridge has been col­lab­o­rat­ing with WuXi Bi­o­log­ics, a sis­ter com­pa­ny of the CRO, on dis­cov­er­ing and de­vel­op­ing new drugs for its tar­get in­di­ca­tions.

Like a num­ber of top Chi­na drug play­ers, CAN­bridge is get­ting start­ed with some ex­ist­ing meds in-li­censed for the Asian mar­ket while fol­low­ing up with some more orig­i­nal work. Its drug Hunterase is an en­zyme re­place­ment ther­a­py un­der re­view now by Chi­nese reg­u­la­to­ry au­thor­i­ties. And the biotech has high hopes for Ner­l­ynx, the breast can­cer drug from Puma.

CAN­bridge has about 60 staffers on the ground in Chi­na, about half of whom sup­port the com­mer­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion, CEO James Xue told End­points News from their Cam­bridge, MA of­fice.

“We are def­i­nite­ly build­ing what I would say as one of the most ro­bust com­mer­cial plat­form for rare dis­ease in the Greater Chi­na re­gion that would re­al­ly en­able us to do what we call high-touch launch and op­er­a­tions of rare dis­ease prod­ucts,” he said.

Hav­ing repo­si­tioned the com­pa­ny to fo­cus on rare dis­ease rather than just on­col­o­gy, Xue — the for­mer gen­er­al man­ag­er of Gen­zyme — said the Chi­nese mar­ket is warm­ing up to rare dis­ease drugs. Take the up­take of Cerezyme, which launched in Chi­na in 2008 un­der his watch. It wasn’t un­til the end of 2012 that en­zyme re­place­ment ther­a­py re­ceived mu­nic­i­pal re­im­burse­ment from Shang­hai; but in the fol­low­ing years cov­er­age has ex­pand­ed in­to about 10 provinces and cities, with up to 100% cov­er­age.

Aware­ness is al­so clear­ly spread­ing from the pa­tient and physi­cian lev­el to the pol­i­cy­mak­ers, with rare dis­ease lan­guage and lists of­fi­cial­ly writ­ten in­to law. And the ag­gres­sive price ne­go­ti­a­tions that gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials have been do­ing for the Na­tion­al Re­im­burse­ment Drug List is a sign that they are mak­ing room for dis­eases cur­rent­ly com­plete­ly un­cov­ered, he added.

“Those are the el­e­ments or the mov­ing parts grad­u­al­ly in place that would al­low us to hope for and al­so plan for rare dis­ease mar­ket in a way that its re­im­bursed mar­ket is around the cor­ner,” he said.

So­cial im­age: James Xue, CAN­bridge CEO

Now that Boehringer Ingelheim’s bet on contract manufacturing in China has paid off, the German drugmaker is anteing up more to get into the research game.

Boehringer has set aside $507.9 million (€451 million) for a new External Innovation Hub to be built in Shanghai over five years. The site will become one of its “strategic pillars” as the team strives to get 71 approvals — either for new products or indications — by 2030, said Felix Gutsche, president and CEO of Boehringer Ingelheim China.

Novartis has reached another large settlement to resolve misconduct allegations, agreeing to pay more than $678 million to settle claims that it had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lavish dinners, so-called speaking fees and expensive alcohol “that were nothing more than bribes” to get doctors to prescribe Novartis medications.

The top-shelf alcohol and lavish meals included a $3,250 per person night at Nobu in Dallas, a $672-per person dinner at Washington DC’s Smith & Wollensky and a $314 per person meal at Sushi Roku in Pasadena, according to the Justice Department complaint. There were at least 7 trips to Hooters and fishing trips in Alaska and off the Florida coast. Each of these events were supposed to be “speaker programs” where doctors educated other doctors on a drug, but the DOJ alleged many were “bogus” wine-and-dine events where the drug was barely mentioned, if at all.  (“Nobody presented slides on the fishing trips,” the complaint says.)

Four years after Switzerland’s Helsinn put $25 million of cash on the table for an upfront and near-term milestone to take MEI Pharma’s drug pracinostat into a long-running Phase III trial for acute myeloid leukemia, the partners are walking away from a clinical pileup.

The drug — an HDAC inhibitor — failed to pass muster during a futility analysis, as researchers concluded that pracinostat combined with azacitidine wasn’t going to outperform the control group in the pivotal.