Watch out blue­bird bio. A lit­tle biotech just got No­var­tis’ back­ing to break out of the back field and race you to the fin­ish line with a BC­MA CAR-T

Scratch one biotech IPO. And add a piv­otal BC­MA CAR-T to the big race against mul­ti­ple myelo­ma.

Af­ter get­ting hung up over the gov­ern­ment shut­down last Jan­u­ary, Po­sei­da Ther­a­peu­tics is get­ting ready to yank its S-1 af­ter go­ing back to the ven­ture well to tank up on clin­i­cal tri­al cash. And they’ve brought No­var­tis in as a big new in­vestor along­side the syn­di­cate — com­ing up with $145 mil­lion to­tal — hand­ing the phar­ma gi­ant a ring­side seat on their up­com­ing piv­otal push for what the biotech be­lieves is a bet­ter BC­MA-tar­get­ed CAR-T for mul­ti­ple myelo­ma.

BC­MA is one of the most crowd­ed fields in on­col­o­gy right now, but Po­sei­da doesn’t just be­lieve that they have a bet­ter way to tack­le this tar­get. CEO Er­ic Os­tertag tells me that their ap­proach to re­ly­ing on stem cell mem­o­ry T cells comes with the promise of far greater dura­bil­i­ty than you’ll find at blue­bird, the leader in the field. And he’s come up with an ac­cel­er­at­ed tri­al plan — shoot­ing to file a BLA in late 2020 — that he be­lieves will re­sult in a vir­tu­al reg­u­la­to­ry tie with the ri­val out­fit.

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