Just a day af­ter an­nounc­ing the for­ma­tion of a start­up in Switzer­land that will de­vel­op al­ter­na­tive TCR cell ther­a­pies, Ver­sant is keep­ing its foot on the gas.

The multi­bil­lion dol­lar life sci­ences VC an­nounced Thurs­day morn­ing it is lead­ing the Se­ries A fund­ing of T-knife, a Ger­man biotech that plans to use its pro­pri­etary hu­man­ized T cell re­cep­tor (HuT­CR) mouse plat­form to treat sol­id tu­mors. T-knife raised about $78.4 mil­lion in the round and hopes to not on­ly de­vel­op its own pipeline but al­so li­cense out its mice for use by oth­er com­pa­nies.

“This plat­form that we have, I would say, is so broad­ly ap­plic­a­ble that we know it has val­ue not on­ly to us but very well give val­ue to oth­er com­pa­nies as well,” CEO Elisa Kieback told End­points News. “So our busi­ness strat­e­gy is, of course, pri­mar­i­ly to de­vel­op our own pipeline of prod­ucts, but at the same time [ap­ply] this plat­form with phar­mas and biotechs to gen­er­ate re­cep­tors for their plat­forms.”

RA Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment co-led the round, and ex­ist­ing in­vestors An­dera Part­ners and Boehringer In­gel­heim Ven­ture Fund al­so par­tic­i­pat­ed.

Thomas Blanken­stein

Pri­va­tized re­search is a bit of a new area for Kieback, as T-knife’s plat­form was spun out of an aca­d­e­m­ic set­ting at the Max-Del­bruck Cen­ter with the sup­port of Char­ité Uni­ver­si­ty Hos­pi­tal in Berlin where Kieback worked with pro­fes­sor Thomas Blanken­stein. Blanken­stein, who is al­so a sci­en­tif­ic co-founder of T-knife, pi­o­neered the foun­da­tion for T-knife’s mice be­gin­ning in the ear­ly 2000s, and he and Kieback have since con­duct­ed aca­d­e­m­ic tri­als pri­or to found­ing the com­pa­ny.

As the costs to run those ex­per­i­ments grew, the duo rec­og­nized the need to take the re­search pri­vate. One of the perks of be­ing pri­vate, Kieback said, is that un­der­tak­ing the nec­es­sary tri­als pro­ceeds at a much faster pace than in acad­e­mia.

“We ba­si­cal­ly re­al­ized what the plat­form could do, but we al­so saw how ex­pen­sive cell ther­a­py is to man­u­fac­ture these prod­ucts and bring them to the clin­ic,” Kieback said. “That was around the time we de­cid­ed we need­ed to take this pri­vate, it couldn’t be lim­it­ed as an aca­d­e­m­ic re­search tool be­cause it re­al­ly had po­ten­tial to bring these re­cep­tors and ther­a­pies to pa­tients, and for that we need­ed pri­vate mon­ey.”

While Mat­ter­horn, which Ver­sant un­veiled Wednes­day, deals al­so with TCR ther­a­pies, it does so in a dif­fer­ent man­ner than T-knife in that the for­mer at­tempts to un­der­stand a class of T cells that could specif­i­cal­ly tar­get MR1. T-knife’s mice, mean­while, ex­press on­ly hu­man TCRs that are re­strict­ed to hu­man leuko­cyte anti­gen, or HLA.

T-knife’s lead prod­uct tar­gets MAGE-A1, which be­longs to the group of can­cer/testis anti­gens, in pa­tients with mul­ti­ple myelo­ma. Nor­mal­ly ex­pressed as testis in healthy tis­sue, this pro­tein can some­times be er­ro­neous­ly ac­ti­vat­ed in tu­mor cells.

“It’s an ide­al tar­get be­cause it’s not present in healthy tis­sue apart from testis, and testis can­not be at­tacked by T cells,” Kieback said. “And the oth­er re­al­ly great thing about it is there are many oth­er tu­mor in­di­ca­tions which are hav­ing MAGE-A1 ex­pres­sion, so we can ap­ply this ther­a­py in so many dif­fer­ent ways.”

The fund­ing will give T-knife three years of run­way, Kieback said, and al­low the biotech to fin­ish Phase I tri­als for that lead can­di­date. In ad­di­tion, the com­pa­ny can al­so bring up to three fur­ther pipeline pro­grams in­to Phase I with the cash.

Long-term, the goal is an IPO, but Kieback isn’t think­ing that far ahead just yet.

“The cur­rent plan is of course to set up as a trans-At­lantic com­pa­ny, so maybe that’s how we’ll be in the be­gin­ning,” Kieback said. “That’s al­so one of the rea­sons why we re­al­ly be­lieve we need US in­vest­ments at this stage be­cause we need to set up of­fices in the US and re­cruit man­age­ment, so this is our next step.”

The FDA late Friday awarded Boehringer Ingelheim the first interchangeability designation for its Humira biosimilar Cyltezo, meaning that when it launches in July 2023, pharmacists will be able to automatically substitute the Boehringer’s version for AbbVie’s mega-blockbuster without a doctor’s input.

The designation will likely give Boehringer, which first won approval for Cyltezo in 2017, the leg up on a crowded field of Humira competitors.

Largely known for its nonpeptide small molecule research, Crinetics has been keeping its radiopharma work comparatively under wraps. But that changed Monday afternoon as the California biotech spun out a new company focused solely on the burgeoning field.

Crinetics launched Radionetics after the closing bell Monday, the company announced, seeding the new entity with $30 million raised from 5AM Ventures and Frazier Healthcare Partners. Radionetics will start with its own radiopharma-centric platform and a pipeline of 10 programs aimed at solid tumors.

About five years ago, Amit Etkin had a breakthrough.

The Stanford neurologist, a soft-spoken demi-prodigy who became a professor while still a resident, had been obsessed for a decade with how to better define psychiatric disorders. Drugs for depression or bipolar disorder didn’t work for many patients with the conditions, and he suspected the reason was how traditional diagnoses didn’t actually get at the heart of what was going on in a patient’s brain.