The process is grind­ing and of­ten ter­mi­nal, like a fine car with a trans­mis­sion patched up a dozen times but still jam­ming and in dire need of re­place­ment. Pa­tients with late-stage chron­ic liv­er dis­ease will de­com­pen­sate (lose or­gan func­tion) and though that in­stance can be treat­ed, each time is like an­oth­er jolt on the gears. Even­tu­al­ly, the car won’t dri­ve. There are trans­plants, but over half of the pa­tients die wait­ing for those.

Meri­am Kab­baj

A new method from Swiss biotech Ver­san­tis wouldn’t cure chron­ic liv­er dis­ease but it promis­es to give far bet­ter im­me­di­ate care and of­fer a treat­ment for a cou­ple rare forms of liv­er dis­ease that cur­rent­ly leave pa­tients with­out good op­tions short of a trans­plant. The com­pa­ny just took in $16 mil­lion in Se­ries B fund­ing to put its plat­form through first-in-hu­man and ef­fi­ca­cy tri­als in small sub­sets of a dis­ease that kills around 2 mil­lion world­wide very year.

“This is a very dis­rup­tive tech­nol­o­gy,” Ver­san­tis co-founder and COO Meri­am Kab­baj told End­points News. “Liv­er dis­ease is on­ly grow­ing and cause many deaths year af­ter year and so far there haven’t been any ef­fi­cient treat­ments.”

Vince Forster

Ver­san­tis’s plat­form works by tak­ing a pop­u­lar and well-re­searched drug de­liv­ery method called li­po­somes and turn­ing it on its head, to cre­ate what CEO Vince Forster called an “un­de­liv­ery mech­a­nism”: Rather than de­liv­er­ing drugs, it takes out tox­ins. Two liters of liq­uid filled with “mi­croscav­engers” — their VS-01 drug — would be ad­min­is­tered in­to a pa­tient’s bel­ly. The scav­engers would swoop up am­mo­nia and oth­er tox­ins the liv­er can no longer me­tab­o­lize, and then the so­lu­tion is sim­ply tak­en out.

“What we can pro­vide is the same ef­fi­cien­cy as dial­y­sis,” Kab­baj said, “but the main dif­fer­ence is that it’s much safer and it can be im­ple­ment­ed very ear­ly on.”

Al­though liv­er dis­ease is one of the most com­mon in the de­vel­oped world, Ver­san­tis cur­rent­ly fo­cus­es on niche ar­eas with­in it: de­com­pen­sat­ed liv­er cir­rho­sis that has caused a form of di­min­ished brain func­tion called he­pat­ic en­cephalopa­thy and acute-on-chron­ic liv­er fail­ure, the more se­vere dis­ease for which they’ve re­ceived FDA or­phan drug sta­tus in 2017. A Phase I tri­al they say promis­es some ef­fi­ca­cy da­ta is just un­der­way and the Se­ries B mon­ey will fund a Phase IIa tri­al.

Ver­san­tis is not the on­ly com­pa­ny get­ting in­to the rapid­ly grow­ing liv­er game. An­oth­er young Swiss biotech, Alen­tis, got near­ly as much in March for their Se­ries A fund­ing while Bel­gium’s Promethera Bio­sciences col­lect­ed $44 mil­lion in May for end-stage liv­er dis­ease, among oth­ers. The area can be a mine­field, though. Last year, Vi­tal Ther­a­pies saw its stock fall 88% to $0.70 af­ter its plat­form to treat acute liv­er dis­ease bombed a Phase III tri­al.

But Kab­baj ar­gued that Ver­san­tis had an edge be­cause un­like oth­er treat­ments, its mi­croscav­engers re­move not just am­mo­nia but oth­er tox­ic metabo­lites. And it’s not on­ly the liv­er. Oth­er parts of the body, in­clud­ing the brain and kid­neys, which al­so see tox­ic buildup from liv­er dis­ease, ben­e­fit as well.

Ver­san­tis is al­so look­ing at broad­er ap­pli­ca­tions for the drug, in­clud­ing for broad­er forms of liv­er dis­ease, for a con­di­tion in in­fants that caus­es po­ten­tial­ly fa­tal buildups in am­mo­nia and, fur­ther down, for treat­ing opi­od over­dos­es.

Swiss­canto In­vest by Zürcher Kan­ton­al­bank led the fi­nanc­ing , Es­per­ante Ven­tures and new pri­vate in­vestors. Redalpine HealthE­quity and Zürcher Kan­ton­al­bank Start-up Fi­nance, both ex­ist­ing in­vestors,  al­so par­tic­i­pat­ed in this round.

So­cial im­age left to right: Vince Forster, So­phie Biguenet, Rekha John­son, Meri­am Kab­baj (Ver­san­tis)

What happens when a successful biotech venture capitalist is unexpectedly diagnosed with a chronic, life-disrupting vertigo disorder? Innovation in neurotology.

That venture capitalist was Jay Lichter, Ph.D., and after learning there was no FDA-approved drug treatment for his condition, Ménière’s disease, he decided to create a company to bring drug development to neurotology. Otonomy was founded in 2008 and is dedicated to finding new drug treatments for the hugely underserved community living with balance and hearing disorders. Helping patients like Jay has been the driving force behind Otonomy, a company heading into a transformative 2020 with three clinical trial readouts: Phase 3 in Ménière’s disease, Phase 2 in tinnitus, and Phase 1/2 in hearing loss. These catalysts, together with others in the field, highlight the emerging opportunity in neurotology.
Otonomy is leading the way in neurotology
Neurotology, or the treatment of inner ear neurological disorders, is a large and untapped market for drug developers: one in eight individuals in the U.S. have moderate-to-severe hearing loss, tinnitus or vertigo disorders such as Ménière’s disease.1 With no FDA-approved drug treatments available for these conditions, the burden on patients—including social anxiety, lower quality of life, reduced work productivity, and higher rates of depression—can be significant.2, 3, 4

The standard for-profit model in drug development is straightforward. Spend millions, even billions, to develop a medicine from scratch. The return on investment (and ideally a tidy profit) comes via volume and/or price, depending on the disease. But the string of big pharma exits and slew of biotech bankruptcies indicate that the model is sorely flawed when it comes to antibiotics.

The industry players contributing to the arsenal of antimicrobials are fast dwindling, and the pipeline for new antibiotics is embarrassingly sparse, the WHO has warned. Drugmakers are enticed by greener pastures, compared to the long, arduous and expensive path to antibiotic approval that offers little financial gain as treatments are typically priced cheaply, and often lose potency over time as microbes grow resistant to them.

Passage Bio — Jim Wilson’s self-described “legacy company” — has wooed a seasoned biotech executive to steer the clinical entry of its first three gene therapy programs.

Bruce Goldsmith jumps to the helm of Passage after a brief CEO stint at Civetta, a cancer-focused startup he helped launch while a venture partner at Deerfield. He takes over from OrbiMed partner and interim chief Stephen Squinto, who will now lead the R&D team.

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli was jailed, publicly pilloried and forced to confront some lawmakers in Washington riled by his move to take an old generic and move the price from $17.50 per pill to $750. But through 4 years of controversy and public revulsion, his company never backed away from the price — left uncontrolled by a laissez faire federal policy on a drug’s cost.

Now the FTC and the state of New York plan to pry his fingers off the drug once and for all and open it up to some cheap competition. And their lawsuit is asking that Shkreli — with several years left on his prison sentence — be banned permanently from the pharma industry.

A couple years ago, Amber Salzman got a call as she was returning East full-time after a two-year stint running a gene therapy company in California.

It was from someone at Flagship Pioneering, the deep-pocketed biotech venture firm. They had a new company with a new way of thinking about sperm. It had been incubating for over a year, and now they wanted her to run it.

“It exactly fit,” Salzman told Endpoints News. “I just thought I had to do something.”