Two R&D pros map a PhI­II game plan with $65M round and a castoff from Pfiz­er

Can Corey Fish­man and Michael Dunne come back and re­peat the suc­cess they had with Du­ra­ta?

A lit­tle more than two years af­ter they suc­ceed­ed in win­ning an ap­proval for dal­ba­vancin af­ter spin­ning out of Pfiz­er with a castoff an­tibi­ot­ic and then sell­ing the com­pa­ny to Ac­tavis for $675 mil­lion, they have the mon­ey and an­oth­er shelved Pfiz­er an­tibi­ot­ic to work with.

This morn­ing they an­nounced that their biotech Iterum had raised $65 mil­lion for the Se­ries B, adding it to the $40 mil­lion that got things start­ed in ear­ly 2016. Their syn­di­cate of mar­quee ven­ture play­ers are back­ing a Phase III pro­gram for su­lopen­em, an old an­tibi­ot­ic that’s been around for years af­ter show­ing some promise for com­bat­ing Gram-neg­a­tive pathogens. Iterum got the an­tibi­ot­ic from Pfiz­er, which put it on the shelf years ago. And Fish­man and Dunne — the for­mer COO and CMO at Du­ra­ta — think they have a win­ner for a new prod­uct that could prove par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful for uri­nary tract in­fec­tions and com­pli­cat­ed in­tra-ab­dom­i­nal in­fec­tions.

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