Tim Lu

Fa­mous MIT re­searcher Tim Lu took the wraps off a transpa­cif­ic biotech he’d launched a lit­tle over three years ago with his broth­er Jef­frey with a $10 mil­lion seed round, at­tempt­ing to use ma­chine learn­ing to de­vel­op new small mol­e­cule drugs. Now, the com­pa­ny is ready to take its next step.

En­gine Bio­sciences un­veiled its first ma­jor VC round with a $43 mil­lion Se­ries A, the biotech an­nounced Wednes­day morn­ing. Over the last three years, the com­pa­ny has worked to es­tab­lish its plat­form, Jef­frey Lu — who is En­gine’s CEO — told End­points News, and re­cent­ly nom­i­nat­ed two tar­gets for their in­ter­nal pipeline.

With the new funds, Lu ex­pects En­gine has enough run­way to get its lead pro­gram in­to its first clin­i­cal tri­al by 2023.

Back in 2018, the Lu broth­ers were part of a wave of biotechs that set the field abuzz, with their ef­forts to tie AI and ma­chine learn­ing to hands-on drug de­vel­op­ment work. It’s an idea that’s gained trac­tion over the last sev­er­al years, as more com­pa­nies and bio­phar­mas aim to speed up the dis­cov­ery process and cut down on R&D costs.

James Collins

Their team al­so in­clud­ed a host of big names in the field, in­clud­ing Tim Lu’s MIT col­league Jim Collins, Mayo Clin­ic pro­fes­sor Hu Li and UC-San Diego re­searcher Prashant Mali.

En­gine’s ap­proach com­bines two dif­fer­ent sys­tems in­to one plat­form. The first al­lows the com­pa­ny to test how hun­dreds of thou­sands of pos­si­ble ge­net­ic com­bi­na­tions can be af­fect­ed by ed­its or changes, and the sec­ond feeds those ex­per­i­ments in­to an al­go­rithm that can pre­dict how those changes might be im­pli­cat­ed by new drugs.

Jef­frey Lu said re­searchers can start with ei­ther sys­tem, but En­gine it­self be­gan on the ex­per­i­ment side.

“It’s kind of chick­en and egg for what comes first,” Lu told End­points. “[The sys­tem] al­lows us to use things like CRISPR for mul­ti­ple ed­its in a sin­gle cell, knock­ing down or switch­ing ex­pres­sion two or three at a time, and see­ing what hap­pens to a cell.”

Af­ter three years of buildup, how­ev­er, Lu added that the AI al­go­rithm is ad­vanced enough to func­tion as the start­ing point as well, mak­ing pre­dic­tions about how edit­ed cells might re­act to drugs. That work can then be checked by re­searchers, us­ing the plat­form to con­duct its ex­per­i­ments.

En­gine has tak­en ad­van­tage of CRISPR thus far to con­duct some of its edit­ing ex­per­i­ments, but the plat­form is adapt­able to oth­er meth­ods such as mi­croR­NA and gene ex­pres­sion, Lu said. It’s al­lowed them to prep its first pipeline can­di­date where they’re go­ing af­ter liv­er, ovar­i­an and col­orec­tal can­cer all at once.

The biotech’s plat­form helped dis­cov­er a ge­net­ic mu­ta­tion linked to all three of these can­cer types, though Jef­frey Lu is keep­ing his cards close to the vest here. He de­clined to re­veal both the tar­get and the bio­mark­er for this small mol­e­cule pro­gram, not­ing on­ly that IND stud­ies will like­ly be­gin in 2022 with the goal for a 2023 clin­i­cal tri­al.

En­gine’s sec­ond pro­gram, which is a bit fur­ther be­hind the lead, is aim­ing for triple neg­a­tive breast can­cer at first.

Wednes­day’s round was led by Po­laris Part­ners, joined by a promi­nent undis­closed Sin­ga­pore firm and In­vus. Ex­ist­ing in­vestors al­so par­tic­i­pat­ed, in­clud­ing 6 Di­men­sions Cap­i­tal, WuXi AppTec, DHVC, ED­BI, Baidu Ven­tures, Vec­tr Ven­tures, Good­man Cap­i­tal, WI Harp­er, and Nest.Bio.

Despite whispers of a busy year for M&A, deal activity in the pharma space is actually down 30% on a semi-annualized basis, according to PwC’s latest report on deal activity. But don’t rule out larger deals in the second half of the year, the consultants said.

PwC pharmaceutical and life sciences consulting solutions leader Glenn Hunzinger expects to see Big Pharma companies picking up earlier stage companies to try and fill pipeline gaps ahead of a slew of big patent cliffs. Though a bear market continues to maul the biotech sector, Hunzinger said recent deals indicate that pharma companies are still paying above current trading prices.

Following the Supreme Court’s historic decision on Friday to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years, Attorney General Merrick Garland sought to somewhat reassure women that states will not be able to ban the prescription drug sometimes used for abortions.

Following the decision, the New England Journal of Medicine also published an editorial strongly condemning the reversal, saying it “serves American families poorly, putting their health, safety, finances, and futures at risk.”

The story of Amryt Pharma’s candidate for the genetic skin condition epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, will soon enter another chapter.

After the Irish drugmaker’s candidate, dubbed Oleogel-S10 and marketed as Filsuvez, was handed a CRL earlier this year, the company announced in a press release that it plans to submit a formal dispute resolution request for the company’s NDA for Oleogel-S10.

After attacks from activist investors and disappointing returns on share prices, Radius Health has now agreed to new ownership, a direction resulting in leaving the Nasdaq.

Radius Health, a biotech out of Massachusetts with one approved product in its arsenal, announced Thursday morning that it agreed to be acquired by two VC firms: Gurnet Point Capital and Patient Square Capital. The deal, worth around $890 million, will include debt assumption and the payout of $1 CVR per share for investors. And on top of that, OrbiMed is providing debt financing.

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis made a name for himself in the 2020 election cycle as the darling of the pharma industry, accepting hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions, even from the likes of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

Those contributions have led Tillis to attempt to re-write patent laws in pharma’s favor, a move which failed to gain steam in 2019, and request for a third time since January that the FDA should help stop “the false narrative that patent protections are to blame for high drug prices.”