As sci­en­tists race to find new ways to look in­to what’s go­ing on in­side cells, ARCH Ven­ture Part­ners and North­pond Ven­tures are in­ject­ing $14 mil­lion in­to a Har­vard team promis­ing to vi­su­al­ize ac­tiv­i­ty on a “sub­cel­lu­lar lev­el” — down to every RNA.

Xi­aowei Zhuang

Xi­aowei Zhuang and David Walt are two of the promi­nent sci­en­tists be­hind Viz­gen. Zhuang, a Howard Hugh­es Med­ical In­sti­tute In­ves­ti­ga­tor and Har­vard pro­fes­sor, was the in­ven­tor of an­oth­er pop­u­lar su­per-res­o­lu­tion mi­croscopy method while David Walt was a sci­en­tif­ic founder of the se­quenc­ing gi­ant Il­lu­mi­na.

Viz­gen was found­ed on MER­FISH, or mul­ti­plexed er­ror-ro­bust flu­o­res­cence in situ hy­bridiza­tion, which was in­vent­ed by Jef­frey Mof­fitt while he was a post­doc at Zhuang’s lab. MER­FISH is, in turn, built on FISH — a tech­nol­o­gy that’s been used for decades to de­tect DNA or RNA tar­gets by send­ing flu­o­res­cent probes to bind to them.

David Walt

The new imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy lever­ages new er­ror de­tec­tion and cor­rec­tion tech­niques, in­clud­ing bar­cod­ing schemes and com­bi­na­to­r­i­al la­bel­ing and imag­ing, to achieve high­er ac­cu­ra­cy and save time.

As a re­sult, it al­lows sci­en­tists to in­ves­ti­gate many more RNA species, ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny.

“Giv­en its abil­i­ty to quan­ti­fy RNAs across a wide range of abun­dances with­out am­pli­fi­ca­tion bias while pre­serv­ing na­tive con­text, we en­vi­sion that MER­FISH will en­able many ap­pli­ca­tions of in situ tran­scrip­tom­ic analy­ses of in­di­vid­ual cells in cul­ture or com­plex tis­sues,” Zhuang and Mof­fitt wrote with col­lab­o­ra­tors in a pa­per in­tro­duc­ing the tech in 2015.

Walt fur­ther ex­plained why that’s use­ful in an in­ter­view with Xcon­o­my:

Every im­age that’s tak­en as a con­se­quence of the way that this process is done is done with ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100 nanome­ters of res­o­lu­tion, so you can zoom out all the way to the whole tis­sue and see where the gene ex­pres­sion is oc­cur­ring, then you can zoom in to a sin­gle cell and look at the sub­cel­lu­lar ex­pres­sion of every one of those RNAs that are present in the sam­ple.

Jef­frey Mof­fitt

That can tell re­searchers a lot about cell type, state, or­ga­ni­za­tion, in­ter­ac­tions as well as func­tion with­in the tis­sue.

“The deep in­for­ma­tion un­locked by MER­FISH ex­pos­es bi­ol­o­gy at the net­work lev­el, dri­ving in­sights that will help us build the fu­ture of hu­man health,” Kei­th Cran­dell, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor at ARCH, said in a state­ment.

The first time San Diego biotech Ambrx tried to go public in 2014, they failed and the company’s board switched to a radically different strategy: They sold themselves for an undisclosed amount to a syndicate of Chinese investors and pharma companies.

Now, after 5 quiet years, that syndicate has raised a mountain of cash and indicated they’ll soon make another bid to go public.

Earlier this month, Ambrx raised $200 million in what they billed as a crossover round financed by Fidelity, BlackRock, Cormorant Asset Management, HBM Healthcare Investments, Invus, Adage Capital Partners and Suvretta Capital Management. It’s the largest amount they’ve ever raised and, according to Crunchbase figures, more than doubles the total amount of VC capital collected since their launch 17 years ago.

Two biotechs said they got turned away by the FDA on Wednesday, in part due to pandemic-related travel restrictions.

North Carolina-based Liquidia Technologies was handed a CRL for its lead pulmonary arterial hypertension drug, citing the need for more CMC data and on-site pre-approval inspections, which the FDA hasn’t been able to conduct due to travel restrictions. The agency also deferred its decision on Revance Therapeutics’ BLA for its frown line treatment, because it needs to inspect the company’s northern California manufacturing facility. The action, Revance emphasized, was not a CRL.

Three months after Reata Pharmaceuticals suggested its Friedreich’s ataxia program omaveloxolone could be delayed, the company revealed that is indeed going to be the case.

Reata $RETA shares took a nosedive Wednesday after the biotech revealed that the FDA said supplemental data for its pivotal trial did not strengthen the case for approval. As a result, the drug is likely to need another study before the FDA takes up the case.

→ San Diego protein degradation startup Vividion Therapeutics has made a change at the top with Jeffrey Hatfield taking the helm as CEO, replacing Diego Miralles six months after Roche forked over $135 million to collaborate with Vividion on their small molecule degraders. Hatfield is chairman of the board at miRagen Therapeutics and previously held the CEO job at Zafgen and Vitae Pharmaceuticals. He also had a series of leadership roles at Bristol Myers Squibb from 1996-2004, including SVP, immunology and virology divisions.

When Shanghai’s STAR board began opening its doors to biotech, it was considered not just a rival to Nasdaq but also the stock exchange in Hong Kong. Those perceptions may take an amicable turn as China expands a mutual access program with the city.

The changes mean investors in mainland China will be able to own Hong Kong biotech chapter stocks, while those in Hong Kong — a much more internationally connected group — would have access to those listed on STAR. In effect, it turns the Shanghai market into a globally accessible exchange overnight while also broadening a key source of revenue for HKEX.