Three months af­ter an­nounc­ing the re­sults of a land­mark tri­al, Thrive Ear­li­er De­tec­tion has raised $257 mil­lion to put their liq­uid biop­sy can­cer test in­to a piv­otal tri­al.

Thrive start­ed rais­ing for the Se­ries B im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter the study re­sults were pub­lished in Sci­ence at the end of April. That study, run across 10,000 women at the Geisinger Health Sys­tem, showed for the first time that a blood test could help doc­tors di­ag­nose cer­tain types of can­cer in pa­tients who did not yet show symp­toms, more than dou­bling the per­cent­age of can­cers that were de­tect­ed.

Isaac Ro

“We want­ed that da­ta in hand as a big cat­a­lyst to dri­ve the process,” Thrive CFO Isaac Ro told End­points. 

The round, led by Cas­din Cap­i­tal and Sec­tion 32, will go in­to com­plet­ing de­vel­op­ment of that test this year, so it can then go in­to a piv­otal tri­al — which would like­ly make it the first liq­uid biop­sy test to do so. Thrive, though, is so far qui­et on de­tails, say­ing they’re still wait­ing to hear from the FDA what the stan­dards will be for ap­proval. The com­pa­ny will al­so use funds to be­gin lay­ing the ground­work for com­mer­cial­iza­tion.

“The clin­i­cal tri­al piece is not triv­ial, it’s go­ing to be a clin­i­cal un­der­tak­ing,” Ro said. “It’s one of the rea­sons we raised how much we raised.”

Still, the round, though large, pales in com­par­i­son to the vast cap­i­tal Thrive’s lead­ing com­peti­tor, Grail, has raised in re­cent years. Backed most promi­nent­ly by ARCH, that biotech has raised $2 bil­lion since it was spun out of Il­lu­mi­na, in­clud­ing a $390 mil­lion Se­ries D in the spring, al­though they re­main be­hind Thrive in de­vel­op­ment. By con­trast, Thrive, launched last May, had raised its $110 mil­lion Se­ries A this year.

David J Daly

With­out in­vok­ing Grail specif­i­cal­ly, Ro told End­points that Thrive would be “one of the most cap­i­tal-ef­fi­cient com­pa­nies out there.” More broad­ly, he ar­gued that ul­ti­mate­ly the field would have mul­ti­ple win­ners, with the smat­ter­ing of star­tups now at work nar­row­ing in­to a few. “It’s go­ing to be high­ly un­like­ly that this is go­ing to be a win­ner-take-all mar­ket,” he said.

The field has come a long way since Ther­a­nos made liq­uid biop­sy in­fa­mous — Ro said no in­vestors men­tioned the fall­en uni­corn — but out­side ex­perts cau­tion it still has a ways to go. The tests, in many ways, face the same set of hur­dles as the ear­ly Covid-19 an­ti­body tests: How do you make it sen­si­tive enough that it picks up the scant bi­o­log­i­cal traces of ear­ly ma­lig­nan­cy, while al­so be­ing spe­cif­ic enough that false pos­i­tives are at a tol­er­a­ble min­i­mum? It’s nev­er great to in­cor­rect­ly tell a per­son they have can­cer.

Thrive may like­ly have to prove it can do both in its up­com­ing tri­al to win ap­proval. The scant de­tails they dis­closed from the study plans in­clude that, un­like the first tri­al, it will be across nu­mer­ous hos­pi­tal sys­tems and it will in­clude men.

Grail, mean­while, is now con­duct­ing a study sim­i­lar to the one Thrive pub­lished in April. The two biotechs use dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies. Grail looks for slight changes to cir­cu­lar pieces of DNA in the blood, while Thrive looks for changes to par­tic­u­lar genes and a hand­ful of pro­teins.

CEO David Daly said he’s hap­py to see the com­pe­ti­tion.

“We ac­tu­al­ly wel­come the in­vest­ment that oth­ers are mak­ing,” Daly told End­points. “With so much fo­cus and re­sources go­ing in­to ear­ly de­tec­tion, it’s an ex­cit­ing time.”

Since losing a controversial court case over orphan drug exclusivity last year, the FDA’s Office of Orphan Products Development has remained entirely silent on orphan exclusivity for any product approved since last November, leaving many sponsors in limbo on what to expect.

That silence means that for more than 70 orphan-designated indications for more than 60 products, OOPD has issued no public determination on the seven-year orphan exclusivity in the Orange Book, and no new listings of orphan exclusivity appear in OOPD’s searchable database, as highlighted recently by George O’Brien, a partner in Mayer Brown’s Washington, DC office.

German pharma giant Bayer will be looking to make a significant investment into one of its US plants that produces over-the-counter drugs.

Bayer announced that it will spend $43.6 million to expand its facility in Myerstown, PA, a small town east of Harrisburg. Bayer plans to increase the site by 70,000 square feet and will have room for the installation of eight packaging lines and an area to install rooftop solar panels. The project is expected to be completed by 2025 and will add around 50 to 75 jobs.

As the global biologics market is expected to hit nearly the half-trillion-dollar mark this year, new JAMA research points to the importance of timely biosimilar entry, particularly as fewer biosimilars are entering the US than in Europe, and as monthly treatment costs for biosimilars were “substantially higher” in the US compared with Germany and Switzerland.

Among the three countries, biosimilar market share at launch was highest in Germany, but increased at the fastest rate in the US, the authors from the University of Zurich’s Institute of Law wrote in JAMA Network Open today.

The European Medicines Agency said Friday that it’s pulling from all European markets pholcodine-containing medicines, which are an opioid used in adults and children for the treatment of dry cough and in combo with other drugs as a treatment for cold and flu.

The decision to pull the medicines comes as the EMA points to the results from the recent ALPHO study, which show that use of pholcodine during the 12 months preceding anesthesia is linked to a risk of an anaphylactic reaction related to the neuromuscular blocking agents (NMBAs) used (with an adjusted OR of 4.2, and a 95% confidence interval of 2.5 to 6.9).