Venrock joins the biotech VC fundraising game, tossing $447M into a $4.3B pot of new money

Bong Koh and Nimish Shah (Venrock)

April 22, 2020 04:34 PM EDT

Venrock joins the biotech VC fundraising game, tossing $447M into a $4.3B pot of new money

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

It’s not unusual to find the partners at Venrock traveling in the A-list section of biotech. They like to find some of the more mature startups headed toward IPOs or some new arrivals on the public market — sticking with deep-pocket investors looking to do big things. And they clearly have a big appetite for rounds that can range up into the stratosphere.

It looks like they’re going to remain in that neighborhood for some time to come.

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At the Inflection Point for the Next Generation of Cancer Immunotherapy

Willem Overwijk, Ph.D.

Vice President, Oncology Research, Nektar Therapeutics

While oncology researchers have long pursued the potential of cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, it was unclear whether these therapies would ever reach patients due to the complexity of manufacturing and costs of development. Fortunately, the recent successful development and regulatory approval of chimeric antigen receptor-engineered T (CAR-T) cells have demonstrated the significant benefit of these therapies to patients.

Tillman Gerngross (Adagio)

November 29, 2021 07:04 AM ESTUpdated 02:20 PM

Tillman Gerngross on Omicron: 'It is a grim situation...we’re going to see a significant drop in vaccine efficacy'

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

Tillman Gerngross, the rarely shy Dartmouth professor, biotech entrepreneur and antibody expert, has been warning for over a year that the virus behind Covid-19 would likely continue to mutate, potentially in ways that avoid immunity from infection and the best defenses scientists developed. He spun out a company, Adagio, to build a universal antibody, one that could snuff out any potential mutation.

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Incorporating External Data into Clinical Trials: Comparing Digital Twins to External Control Arms

Unlearn.AI

Most drug development professionals are familiar with the nerve-racking wait for the read-out of a large trial. If it’s negative, is the investigational therapy ineffective? Or could the failure result from an unforeseen flaw in the design or execution of the protocol, rather than a lack of efficacy? The team could spend weeks analyzing data, but a definitive answer may be elusive due to insufficient power for such analyses in the already completed trial. These problems are only made worse if the trial had lower enrollment, or higher dropout than expected due to an unanticipated event like COVID-19. And if a trial is negative, the next one is likely to be larger and more costly — if it happens at all.

ENDPOINTS CAREERS

Lead Manager / Associate Director of Statistical Genetics

Deep Genomics

Boston, MA, USA

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Iain McGill, Quell CEO

November 29, 2021 10:33 AM EST

Financing

Cell/Gene Tx

European investors pour $156M to beat Bluestone, Third Rock and RA Capital in multibillion-dollar race to the clinic

Amber Tong

Senior Editor

Amid burgeoning efforts to create a new type of cell therapy out of regulatory T cells — whether by channeling or blocking their immunosuppressive power — Quell Therapeutics wants to shoot for a first.

If everything goes well, the Syncona-backed biotech will be in the clinic early next year, marking what it calls the historic feat of dosing a patient with a CAR-Treg with multiple edited genes.

November 29, 2021 10:06 AM ESTUpdated 01:19 PM

FDA+

Coronavirus

Like the flu vaccine every year, the FDA could move quickly on a variant-targeted Covid vaccine

Zachary Brennan

Senior Editor

In the same way that the FDA signs off on flu vaccines every year without requiring large clinical trials to measure their efficacy, the FDA may employ a similar strategy in authorizing variant-focused versions of the mRNA vaccines.

As the world braces for more data on the latest variant Omicron, which may reduce vaccine efficacy, top vaccine developers like Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have promised they can pull together a new vaccine targeted against a specific Covid variant in about 100 days. Since Omicron emerged last week, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and J&J have all said they’ve begun work on Omicron-specific vaccines, if needed.

Jonathan Montagu (L) and Gerry Harriman, HotSpot co-founders

November 29, 2021 06:30 AM ESTUpdated 06:53 AM

Financing

HotSpot gets hotter with $100M raise to push toward clinic

Paul Schloesser

Associate Editor

HotSpot Therapeutics, the allostery-focused biotech that works on what it calls “natural hotspots” — hence the name — is getting a bit hotter in its valuation from investors. And to that end they’ve raised $100 million.

The four-year-old AI computational biotech started by two former Nimbus execs announced this morning that it closed its Series C round right at the line of a 9-figure investment, courtesy of some big investors.

November 27, 2021 06:00 AM EST

Weekly

Thanksgiving edition: Top 15 Endpoints stories of 2021; Can you name that vaccine?; Merck's Covid antiviral disappoints; FDA nominee's industry ties; and more

Amber Tong

Senior Editor

Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

Happy Thanksgiving to all those who are celebrating it — although, if we are being honest, this week’s abbreviated edition is really for those who are not. Wherever you’re tuning in from, we appreciate your support, hope you find this recap helpful and we wish you a wonderful weekend.

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ENDPOINTS CAREERS

Executive Director - Data Analysis - Science & Technology

Alexandria Real Estate Equities

Pasadena, CA

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November 26, 2021 08:35 AM ESTUpdated 12:53 PM

Bioregnum

Cell/Gene Tx

What were Endpoints readers tuning into this year? Here’s a look at our 15 most popular reports of the year (so far)

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

At the beginning of this year, I laid out a basic objective for Endpoints News as we headed to our 5th anniversary. We’ve long been doing a fine job covering the breaking news in R&D — if I do say so myself — but we needed to expand our horizons on industry coverage, increase the staff and go much, much deeper when the stories demanded it.

In a phrase: broader and deeper.

It’s safe to say, based on our daily web traffic, that you all seemed to like this idea. We’ve doubled the staff — thanks to a growing group of paid subscribers — ramped up the daily report and now publish a regular slate of in-depth articles. And traffic — those clicks you always read about — have gone up in volume too. Monthly sessions are up 43%, to close to 1.5 million. Unique readers are up 63%, to 874,480 in October, after setting a record of close to a million the month before. Page views are running at 3 million-plus a month. And the overall number of subscribers has surged to 124,000.

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Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission

November 26, 2021 07:06 AM ESTUpdated 05:32 PM

Coronavirus

Omicron: Researchers scramble as new coronavirus mutation takes flight around the globe — Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna vow swift response

John Carroll

Editor & Founder

As Americans were waking up for their Black Friday rituals, they were greeted with the news that a new mutation of the Covid-19 virus has appeared and been sequenced — after it caught an international flight to Hong Kong. And two of the leading Covid-19 vaccine developers promised delivery of a new vaccine “within 100 days” if necessary while a third spelled out its 3-prong strategy hours later.

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