Named for the Ital­ian term in­di­cat­ing a piece of mu­sic should be played at an up­beat and live­ly tem­po, Cal­i­for­nia-based Vi­vace Ther­a­peu­tics seems to have lived up to its name­sake.

In the mere five years the small-mol­e­cule drug dis­cov­ery and de­vel­op­ment com­pa­ny has been in busi­ness, its sci­en­tists and re­searchers have de­vot­ed sig­nif­i­cant amounts of time and mon­ey to­ward ther­a­peu­tics that tar­get a path­way in the body that can cause can­cer­ous tu­mors to de­vel­op if cer­tain pro­teins are ac­ti­vat­ed. Now, with $30 mil­lion in Se­ries C fi­nanc­ing, Vi­vace is aim­ing to test one of its can­di­dates against that path­way start­ing in ear­ly 2021.

The pro­teins, called YAP, in­vade cells through what’s called the Hip­po path­way — a sig­nal­ing sys­tem in the body that con­trols tis­sue re­gen­er­a­tion and tells or­gans when it’s time to stop grow­ing. If ac­ti­vat­ed, YAP can dis­rupt the path­way in a way that caus­es the can­cer­ous tu­mors to form.

CEO Sofie Qiao told End­points News that ex­am­in­ing the re­la­tion­ship be­tween YAP and the Hip­po path­way was the rea­son she found­ed Vi­vace in 2015 — it’s a nov­el re­la­tion­ship, es­pe­cial­ly in terms of its con­nec­tion to can­cer. For the first two years, Qiao said, the com­pa­ny op­er­at­ed in stealth mode, but in May 2017, Vi­vace raised a $25 mil­lion Se­ries B to be­come a com­mer­cial-fo­cused on­col­o­gy com­pa­ny.

Now, the work to un­der­stand and po­ten­tial­ly treat a pro­tein mu­ta­tion that may cause lung, gas­tric, colon, cer­vi­cal, ovar­i­an, breast, melanoma, he­pa­to­cel­lu­lar car­ci­no­ma and squa­mous cell car­ci­no­ma can­cers has paid off in the biggest way yet for Qiao and Vi­vace with the lat­est $30 mil­lion round.

“Most of the on­col­o­gy play­ers in our in­dus­try have been watch­ing this path­way for quite a few years, and many of them have proac­tive­ly ap­proached us for dis­cus­sion since we do have a pub­lic pres­ence,” Qiao said. “To the best of our knowl­edge, no one has sent any mol­e­cule to the clin­ic, so we are po­si­tioned to be the first com­pa­ny to test a mol­e­cule tar­get­ing this path­way in hu­man set­ting.”

No­table in­vestors for this round in­clude: Canaan Part­ners, WuXi Health­care Ven­tures, Cen­o­va Cap­i­tal, Se­quoia Cap­i­tal Chi­na, Box­er Cap­i­tal and RA Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment.

Qiao said near­ly all of the $30 mil­lion would be put in­to the hu­man clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment process of Vi­vace’s drug can­di­date. The ini­tial process­es will tar­get tu­mors that are known to be en­tire­ly de­pen­dent on ac­ti­vat­ed YAP, and Vi­vace said in a news re­lease that pre-clin­i­cal R&D showed that its clin­i­cal can­di­date is ac­tive as a monother­a­py and in com­bi­na­tion with oth­er an­ti-can­cer ther­a­pies against tu­mors that re­ly up­on dys­func­tion of the Hip­po path­way.

Len Post, Vi­vace’s chief sci­en­tif­ic of­fi­cer, said in an in­ter­view that un­til now, no sci­en­tif­ic progress had re­al­ly been made on how to dis­rupt the Hip­po path­way if YAP pro­teins were ac­ti­vat­ed. Vi­vace’s work, he said, dis­cov­ered how cer­tain com­pounds work in the con­text of the path­way and what has to hap­pen to in­hib­it the path­way from form­ing can­cer­ous tu­mors.

For YAP pro­teins to ac­ti­vate, they have to find an­oth­er pro­tein called a tran­scrip­tion­al en­hanced as­so­ciate do­main. Vi­vace’s com­pounds block those TEAD pro­teins by pre­vent­ing the ad­di­tion of a fat­ty acid that would al­low the two pro­teins to bond.

The $30 mil­lion round brings Vi­vace’s to­tal in­vest­ment haul just since 2017 to rough­ly $70 mil­lion. Qiao said that those fig­ures in­di­cate a clear in­ter­est from the biotech in­vest­ment com­mu­ni­ty in the Hip­po path­way and its po­ten­tial im­pact on the field of on­col­o­gy.

“That shows how much en­thu­si­asm and in­ter­est the in­vestor com­mu­ni­ty has for this path­way,” she said. “I think they re­al­ly like our da­ta and our team and the po­ten­tial of our mol­e­cule re­al­ly gen­er­at­ing clin­i­cal ef­fi­ca­cy.”

The firehose of biopharma news is gushing these days.

That’s why broader and deeper is the theme for 2021 at Endpoints. You can expect new coverage outside our core R&D focus, with deeper reporting in some key areas. When John Carroll and I launched Endpoints nearly five years ago, we were wading in waist-high waters. Now we’re a team of 25 full-time staffers (and growing) with plans to cover the flood of biopharma news, Endpoints-style.

About 15 months since closing a $28 million Series A, a San Diego protein-degradation upstart returned to the venture well Thursday with an extension of that round and some new hires, including one of the city’s best-connected biotech execs.

Plexium has bagged an additional $35 million in financing, the biotech said, money that will push undisclosed oncology and immuno-oncology programs into the clinic. In addition, longtime industry vet Mike Grey is jumping on as chairman of the board, and two others from Thursday’s leads — Adam Goulburn from Lux Capital and Rob Hopfner from Pivotal BioVentures — joined the board too.

Eli Lilly says bamlanivimab lowered the risk of contracting symptomatic Covid-19 in a first-of-its-kind trial involving nursing home residents and staff, paving the way for a new option to protect against the virus.

But how big of an impact it might have, and what role it will play, at a time vaccines are being rolled out to the exact population it is targeting still remains unclear.

Among 965 participants in the study — all of whom tested negative for the coronavirus at baseline — the number of symptomatic cases reported in the bamlanivimab arm was 57% lower than that in the placebo arm (odds ratio 0.43, p=0.00021). In addition to that primary endpoint, all secondary endpoints reached statistical significance.

As reports crop up that deliveries of Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine are being unexpectedly cut, Italy wonders if it can take the vaccine developers to court, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

After its shipment for this week was cut by 29%, the Italian government consulted its attorney general about taking legal action, the WSJ reported. Pfizer and BioNTech had warned the EU and Canada last week that their allocations would be reduced as Pfizer upgrades its Belgium factory. What Italy says it doesn’t appreciate, though, is the short notice.

Seven years after the FDA first approved Esbriet, the blockbuster Roche IPF drug is getting an expedited review for a second indication.

On Thursday, the agency gave Esbriet priority review for unclassified interstitial lung diseases, or forms of pulmonary inflammation and scarring that don’t fit easily into the over 200 known types of ILD. The move comes 10 months after Esbriet received breakthrough designation and sets Roche up for a decision by May.