Hong­bo Lu was a board mem­ber at Crown­Bio, a pre­clin­i­cal on­col­o­gy CRO, when a lo­cal com­pa­ny — so lo­cal it didn’t even have an Eng­lish name — li­censed a c-Met in­hibitor from them. Then they didn’t think much about it.

Over the next eight years though, Lu, a part­ner at Vi­vo Cap­i­tal, watched the biotech boot­strap it­self, build­ing a whole pipeline and dis­cov­ery ca­pa­bil­i­ties around the an­chor­ing as­set.

Im­pressed by what they saw, Vi­vo Cap­i­tal has now teamed up with Bain Cap­i­tal and Pri­mav­era to in­fuse $200 mil­lion in­to the com­pa­ny — which ac­tu­al­ly has been op­er­at­ing un­der two sep­a­rate en­ti­ties man­aged by the same team. The Se­ries A will buy out the an­gel in­vestors who have been fund­ing the work, and put all the pro­grams un­der the same um­brel­la.

They’re call­ing it Avi­s­tone Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals.

“Vi­vo in­vests in health­care glob­al­ly,” Lu said in an in­ter­view with End­points News. “As we look at the land­scape in Chi­na, we see tremen­dous in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties in in­no­va­tion, but more com­plex pri­vate eq­ui­ty deals have emerged as well. Avi­s­tone ac­tu­al­ly is the per­fect com­bi­na­tion of both in our view.”

The size of the round is large by any re­gard, but Avi­s­tone is spe­cial in an­oth­er way: Un­like many of the flashy up­starts that boast of founders and ex­ec­u­tives with glob­al ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing with multi­na­tion­als, the ré­sumés of Avi­s­tone ex­ecs — all the way down from CEO Hep­eng Shi — are full of po­si­tions at lo­cal Chi­nese phar­ma com­pa­nies.

“This man­age­ment team is very low key. We see tremen­dous val­ue in their ex­e­cu­tion ca­pa­bil­i­ty,” Lu said. “We think their lo­cal ex­e­cu­tion in Chi­na is one of the best.”

With a pitch cen­tered around tar­get­ed on­col­o­gy ther­a­pies, those skills could be es­pe­cial­ly im­por­tant in terms of speed­ing up the time to ap­proval, not­ed Bain life sci­ences man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Ricky Sun. Avi­s­tone has “com­pelling clin­i­cal da­ta” to show for its ty­ro­sine ki­nase in­hibitors, added Ji­aqi Zheng, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Pri­mav­era Cap­i­tal.

The c-Met drug re­mains in the lead, and it’s in late-stage tri­als for ge­net­i­cal­ly-de­fined pop­u­la­tions of non-small cell lung can­cer and glioblas­toma. Chi­na’s NM­PA has grant­ed it break­through ther­a­py des­ig­na­tion.

What the in­vestors are hop­ing to achieve is to add a glob­al touch — el­e­vat­ing it to the in­ter­na­tion­al stage and bring­ing in po­ten­tial part­ners when the time is ripe. And they be­lieve the com­pa­ny has what it takes it stand out, even if it’s most­ly stay­ing be­hind a veil right now.

“The man­age­ment team has been very per­sis­tent in their pur­suit of de­vel­op­ing can­cer drugs,” Lu said. “Dr. Shi has such grit to work on this ef­fort for close to 10 years, and that’s a re­flec­tion of com­mit­ment.”

Over the past three years, Endpoints News has spotlighted 60 women who have blazed trails and supercharged R&D across the biopharma world. And judging from the response we’ve received, to both our special reports and live events, telling their stories — including any obstacles they may have had to overcome — has inspired our readers in many different ways.

But change takes time, and the fact remains that women are still underrepresented at the upper ranks of the drug-making world.

The FDA is still wary about a trial testing a microbiome therapy in patients with steroid-resistant acute graft-versus-host disease (aGVHD).

A year after MaaT Pharma’s IND application in the US was first met with a clinical hold, the French biotech said the agency is maintaining the hold. The crux of the matter, MaaT suggested, has to do with the way it puts together its drug candidate, which is administered as an enema (i.e. an injection of fluid into the bowel).

Pfizer is launching its second-ever rebate program, this time for Panzyga, its treatment for a rare neurological disease of the peripheral nerves.

The program began last month, according to STAT which first reported the news, and offers a refund of out-of-pocket costs for patients who must discontinue their course before the fifth treatment for “clinical reasons.”

Panzyga was approved back in 2018 to treat primary immunodeficiency (PI) in patients two years and older and chronic immune thrombocytopenia (cITP) in adults. It has since picked up an indication in chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), a condition that’s characterized by weakness of the arms or legs, tingling or numbness, and a loss of deep tendon reflexes, according to the NIH.