Lu­mi­ra Ven­tures closed its largest fund on Mon­day, rak­ing in $220 mil­lion to pump in­to the life sci­ences — but in­stead of tar­get­ing biotech hubs like San Fran­cis­co and Boston, the com­pa­ny is rolling the dice on “un­der­served ge­o­gra­phies” in the US and Cana­da.

“We find of­ten­times com­pa­nies lo­cat­ed in places like Mon­tre­al, or Fort Laud­erdale, FL, or Kansas City or Phoenix, AZ just have more cap­i­tal ef­fi­cien­cy and bet­ter val­u­a­tions, with­out hav­ing to com­pro­mise any­thing at all in the qual­i­ty of the in­no­va­tion and the man­age­ment tal­ent,” co-founder and man­ag­ing part­ner Ger­ry Brunk told End­points News. 

The lat­est fund — dubbed Lu­mi­ra Ven­tures IV — is 55% larg­er than the com­pa­ny’s last raise and will al­low the team to bring on 15 to 20 new port­fo­lio com­pa­nies, Brunk said. Lu­mi­ra has 30 com­pa­nies in its cur­rent port­fo­lio, in­clud­ing gene ther­a­py play­er Xy­lo­Cor Ther­a­peu­tics (which re­cent­ly raised a $22.6 mil­lion Se­ries A ex­ten­sion), and ra­dio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals-fo­cused Fu­sion Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals (which last month en­tered a lease agree­ment with Hamil­ton, On­tario-based Mc­Mas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty for a 27,000-square-foot man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty).

“We’re re­al­ly bal­anced by stage,” Brunk said. “We will in­vest in com­pa­ny cre­ation ac­tiv­i­ties and seed stage in­vest­ing, all the way through growth eq­ui­ty, pri­vate trans­ac­tions as well as PIPE in­vest­ments in pub­lic com­pa­nies.”

In more than two decades, the firm has in­vest­ed over $1 bil­lion in 100-plus com­pa­nies, ac­cord­ing to the web­site. And it isn’t afraid to go bold. Back in 2018, the team helped launch Medexus Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, which was cre­at­ed by merg­ing one pub­lic and two pri­vate com­pa­nies: Pe­di­apharm, Medexus, and Medac Phar­ma, re­spec­tive­ly.

“We’re a lit­tle unique rel­a­tive to some ven­ture firms in that we’ve got a com­fort lev­el do­ing very cre­ative spe­cial sit­u­a­tion types of op­por­tu­ni­ties,” Brunk said.

While this marks Lu­mi­ra’s fourth flag­ship fund, the team has al­so man­aged sev­er­al spe­cial pur­pose funds, in­clud­ing a new $35 mil­lion strate­gic fund in part­ner­ship with an phar­ma com­pa­ny, which will be an­nounced lat­er this week. With roots in Cana­da, the firm says its mis­sion is to “skate where the puck is go­ing to be,” tar­get­ing com­pa­nies ad­dress­ing un­met needs in cost-ef­fi­cient ways.

In­vestors in Lu­mi­ra Ven­tures IV in­clude Kens­ing­ton Cap­i­tal Part­ners, Fonds de Sol­i­dar­ité FTQ, North­leaf Cap­i­tal Part­ners, Caisse de dépôt et place­ment du Québec, the Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Bank of Cana­da, Teralys Cap­i­tal, the On­tario Cap­i­tal Growth Cor­po­ra­tion, Roy­al Bank of Cana­da, In­vestisse­ment Québec, Fon­dac­tion, Alexan­dria Ven­ture In­vest­ments, An­geli­ni Phar­ma, Chi­na Grand Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and Health­care Hold­ings, Vanci­ty, and Amana Glob­al Part­ners.

“We’ve seen a num­ber of our peers suc­cess­ful­ly raise new funds over the past year,” Brunk said. “Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it took a glob­al health care cri­sis to el­e­vate the val­ue of the in­dus­try, I think, to a lot of folks. But we feel very priv­i­leged to have the new cap­i­tal to back that next set of en­tre­pre­neurs.”

With rumors swirling about a potential buyout of biotech Acceleron and its lead PAH drug sotatercept, market watchers have been keeping close tabs on industry movers and shakers due up for an expensive bolt-on. According to a new report, it appears Merck may be the one.

Merck is in “advanced talks” on a deal to acquire Cambridge, MA-based Acceleron in what previous reports pegged as a potential $11 billion buyout, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. A deal could come as early as this week, according to the Journal.

Licensing is one of the most common ways big drugmakers leverage biotech innovation to drive gains across their pipelines — and the structure of those deals is pretty well established. But one biotech with home bases in China and the US thinks it may have a better way.

On Tuesday, Cambridge-based biotech Anji Pharma closed a $70 million Series B with two late-stage molecules in the fold and a mission to rewrite the rules of drug licensing through what it calls “dynamic equity” deals and a joint venture-heavy game plan. The round was funded in whole by Chinese hedge fund CR Capital.

Pfizer and BioNTech said Tuesday they submitted to FDA positive data from a Phase II/III trial of their Covid-19 vaccine in children aged 5 to less than 12 years old.

A formal EUA submission for the vaccine in these children is expected to follow “in the coming weeks,” the companies said in a statement.

The trial of 2,268 healthy participants aged 5 to less than 12 years old showed the vaccine was safe and elicited robust neutralizing antibody responses using a two-dose regimen of 10 μg doses, which is one-third the dose that’s administered to adults.

Sanofi is throwing in the towel on mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines.

The French drugmaker will halt development on its unmodified mRNA Covid-19 shot despite what it said were positive Phase I/II results, a spokesperson told Endpoints News on Tuesday morning. Sanofi said the reason it’s stopping the Covid-19 mRNA program, developed in partnership with its new $3.2 billion acquisition Translate Bio, is because the market is too crowded.