Deals Of The Week: UCSF Catalyzes R&D Tech-Transfer Deals With Private Sector

Neither MedImmune, the biologics arm of AstraZeneca, nor the University of California, San Francisco, is a stranger to R&D collaboration between private industry and academia, but the agreement they signed on Feb. 11 is somewhat unique in that it will take advantage of a UCSF program that was intended to provide external expertise that might help to move basic research into more advanced stages.

At UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the Catalyst Awards program benefits from the input of industry and academic advisors who review burgeoning science and help select which projects should advance further and be given increased resources. CTSI oversees UCSF researchers working on therapeutics, devices, diagnostics and digital health applications, explained June Lee, director of early translational research at CTSI.

The Catalyst program started with about 120 advisors, and now has about 140 and is growing in numbers. “These folks are from all different disciplines, mostly from industry, and represent various different sectors and areas of expertise for product development in the life sciences,” Lee said. According to her, it’s more of a happy coincidence than a plan that the Catalyst Awards program spurred a broad-based partnership – considering both small- and large-molecule projects in cardiovascular and metabolic disease, oncology, respiratory, inflammation and autoimmune disorders, neuroscience and infectious disease – with MedImmune.

The collaboration could end up bringing early-stage assets to MedImmune (or AstraZeneca) in any of those areas, Lee added, since UCSF has 2,400 faculty, of whom about 1,300 are doing research primarily. “Our people are working in all areas of research, and that’s not accounting for post-docs or graduate students,” she said.

“Our primary goal was to enable and support of early-stage technology projects at UCSF,” she said. “For things that have product potential, we bring in the necessary expertise to help the faculty move projects along. Even though spurring deal-making may not have been our primary purpose, the program really is a very appropriate portal for people on the outside to look through to determine which university technologies are most ready to be licensed out.”

Terms have not been disclosed for the MedImmune/UCSF tie-up but Senior VP and Head of the Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmune Innovative Medicines Unit (iMED) Bing Yao said that unlike the Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland, Baltimore arrangements signed last year, which feature an overall R&D funding allocation, funding for this partnership will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

“Some of the programs, we will want to bring to the next stage – they could be preclinical or [we could want to move them] further into clinical development,” Yao noted. “This way, we can give a lot of input. As a company developing products for multiple therapeutic areas, we can bring our expertise to facilitate [the projects] but each program will be unique.”

The agreement extends for three years, with an option to extend it. MedImmune and AstraZeneca personnel will join with the Catalyst Awards advisors and UCSF staff to determine which products move forward with MedImmune/AstraZeneca backing. And the company will have exclusive options rights to the programs it backs, Yao said.

In the six months, Gaithersburg, Md.-based MedImmune has shored up its local base by signing a five-year, $6.5 million, broad-based R&D partnership with Johns Hopkins University in December and a five-year, $6 million pact with University of Maryland, Baltimore in September. It also has R&D relationships with academia in the U.K. and, now, with the UCSF partnership, gets better access to technological advances stemming from the biotechnology hub in the San Francisco bay area, Yao told Deals of the Week.

UCSF, meanwhile, is one of five founding members of the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium, founded in 2012 to serve as a clearinghouse for both academia and industry on research underway within U.S. and international drug research programs. Since 2010, UCSF has negotiated research collaborations with Genentech, Pfizer, Sanofi and Bayer, while licensing a preclinical antibody for organ failure to Stromedix and genetic encoding intellectual property for Parkinson’s disease to uniQure.

While that agreement was signed, other M&A and licensing activity was heating up the cold and snowy winter. Read on for the rest of ....

Mallinckrodt/Cadence: Mallinckrodt will have a lot of work to do to make good on the $1.3 billion it’s paying for Cadence Pharmaceuticals, a price more than 10 times the projected 2013 sales for Cadence’s sole product, Ofirmev (intravenous acetaminophen). Mallinckrodt says the acquisition gives it a third therapeutics platform, in the hospital setting, in addition to its existing focus on generic drugs and pain medications. The specialty drug company plans to keep Cadence’s sales and marketing capabilities and acquire additional hospital products to sell through them. Mallinckrodt announced the acquisition Feb. 11, its first major transaction since it was spun-out from medical device and supply company Covidien in July. Ofirmev launched in January 2011 and is approved to treat mild-to-moderate pain, for the management of moderate-to-severe pain with adjunctive opioid analgesics, and for the reduction of fever. It has expected net product revenues of $110.5 million for 2013. That’s more than twice the $50.1 million posted in 2012, its first full year of sales. As of Sept. 30, Cadence shareholders included Fidelity Management (7.6 million shares), T. Rowe Price Associates (7.2 million), Capital Research (7.1 million), Wellington Management (6 million), The Vanguard Group (3.4 million), NEA (2.1 million) and BlackRock (1.9 million). Mallinckrodt will pay $14 per share for Cadence, a 32% premium to the trailing 30-trading-day volume weighted average price; in 2006, the company completed an IPO at $9 per share with a valuation of about $250 million. That gives shareholders who bought and held IPO shares a roughly 1.5x return. - Stacy Lawrence and Jessica Merrill

Pierre Fabre/Aurigene: Pierre Fabre Group, the French pharmaceuticals and cosmetics firm whose sales are split almost equally between drugs and skincare cosmetics, has acquired worldwide development and commercialization rights (excluding India) to a novel immune checkpoint modulator, AUNP-12, from the Indian drug-discovery firm Aurigene Discovery Technologies. AUNP-12 is the only peptide under development as a PD-1 immune modulator, the companies say. The candidate could be associated with greater efficacy and fewer side effects when used as part of combination therapies, they announced Feb. 12. The peptide achieves effective levels in vivo after subcutaneous dosing, and has inhibited tumor growth and metastasis in preclinical models of cancer. Aurigene, the Bangalore-based biotech that has collaborated with six of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies since its inception in 2002, will receive an undisclosed upfront payment from Pierre Fabre, and milestone payments based on development, regulatory and commercial progress. The deal terms are in line with others in this space, the companies said. It’s also the first major deal the French company has signed since the death of its founder, Pierre Fabre, in the middle of last year. Pierre Fabre specializes in the development of anti-cancer drugs, either alone or with partners; with marketed drugs that include Javlor (vinflunine) and Navelbine (vinorelbine), while Aurigene is a profitable Indian biotech that generates lead compounds and progresses them to preclinical development in concert with collaborators, particularly in oncology and inflammation. - John Davis

Retrophin/Manchester: Retrophin, which netted $37.4 million in an initial public offering in January, has arranged to purchase privately held Manchester Pharmaceuticals for $62.5 million, including $29.5 million upfront. Announced Feb. 12, the transaction is expected to close on March 1, Retrophin said. Like Retrophin, Manchester focuses on rare diseases. The Ft. Collins, Colo.-based firm has two FDA-approved drugs in its portfolio – Chenodal (chenodeoxycholic acid), which is indicated for patients suffering from gallstones in whom surgery poses an unacceptable health risk due to disease or advanced age, and Vecamyl (mecamylamine HCI tablets), indicated for the management of moderately severe to severe essential hypertension and uncomplicated cases of malignant hypertension. Retrophin said it also will seek quick FDA approval for Chenodal, the only FDA-approved chenodeoxycholic acid, for cerebrotendinous xanthomatosis (CTX), a rare metabolic disorder that can cause severe intellectual disability or even prove fatal in young patients. The New York firm also guided that it anticipates revenue of between $10 million and $12 million this year overall, and $19 million to $21 million in 2015. - Joseph Haas

Debiopharm/Affinium: Swiss biopharma Debiopharm Group broadened its antibiotic portfolio by acquiring key assets from Toronto-based Affinium Pharmaceuticals on Feb. 11. The deal includes two narrow-spectrum anti-bacterial candidates, the Phase IIa FabI inhibitor AFN-1252 and its Phase I prodrug, AFN-1720. Debiopharm also acquired Affinium’s technology platform with which it created the two drugs. Terms of the arrangement weren’t disclosed. Affinium says its drugs represent a new class of antibiotics that inhibit the type-II fatty acid synthesis pathway, known as FAS-II, essential for bacterial growth. Its compounds have shown promise in combating staphylococcus infections, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-intermedia Staphylococcus aureus infections, while allowing intravenous-to-oral switching for patients leaving hospital care. Debiopharm expects to develop a companion diagnostic to select appropriate patients as AFN-1720 progresses through the clinic. Debiopharm entered the anti-bacterial field last fall, when it struck a deal with India’s TCG Life Sciences to develop new antibiotics. The company is aiming to develop drugs that preserve existing gut flora while overcoming resistance to broad-spectrum drugs. Affinium raised $33 million in two rounds of funding in 2007 and 2011, from investors including SV Life Sciences, Genesys Capital Partners, Forward Ventures, Oxford Bioscience Partners and Ontario Emerging Technologies Fund.  - Paul Bonanos

Aveo/Astellas: In our “No-Deal of the Week,” Aveo Pharmaceuticals and Astellas announced Feb. 14 that they have terminated a partnership around renal cell carcinoma candidate tivozanib. The Japanese pharma paid $125 million upfront, with $50 million pegged to cover Aveo’s R&D expenses, in 2011 for worldwide rights, except for Asia, to develop, manufacture and market the compound, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor of all vascular endothelial growth factor receptors. An NDA was filed in November 2012, but an FDA “complete response” letter and unenthusiastic reception at an advisory committee left the companies not expecting approval in advanced RCC. They terminated the trial program for that indication and decided to re-focus on developing tivozanib for breast and colorectal cancers. Now, Astellas has decided to exit the collaboration for what it calls “strategic” reasons, and the two companies are terminating a Phase II program studying the compound in CRC. All rights to tivozanib will return to Aveo as of Aug. 11. - J.A.H.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Deals Of The Week: New Academia/Industry Partnership Template In Eisai/JHU Collaboration?

As founder and president of a coalition working to enhance academic drug-discovery and collaborations between academia and industry, Barbara Slusher has a good idea of the advantages and pitfalls of such arrangements. She points to ongoing work between Japan’s Eisai and Johns Hopkins University, where she serves as director of neurotranslational drug discovery at the medical school’s Brain Science Institute, as a potentially more mutually rewarding template for academic/industry tie-ups.

In October 2011, Eisai signed a five-year drug-discovery alliance with JHU, initially slated to focus on central nervous system targets. Slusher, who heads up the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium (ADDC) in addition to her responsibilities at JHU, said the partners are about 18 months into a partnership currently focused on two targets, one undisclosed. The other is aimed at identifying drug-like molecules that inhibit xCT, a glutamate cysteine exchanger that Eisai believes could offer potential in combating inflammatory disease.

Barbara Slusher, JHU Brain Science Institute
and Academic Drug Discovery Consortium

Under this alliance, written to last the greater of five years or to the completion or termination of all related projects, the Brain Science Institute reviews target research throughout JHU’s roster of researchers and presents potentially novel and interesting targets for Eisai’s review. Eisai then selects the targets of greatest interest for the high-throughput screening collaboration.

The compound libraries generally available to academic researchers are not as large, diverse or drug-like as those found within a biopharmaceutical company’s library, developed through years of wide-ranging R&D work, Slusher said. Slusher came to JHU in 2010 after working in drug discovery at five biopharma companies, including Eisai, and set a goal of establishing collaborations offering greater potential for academic discovery work.

“One of the things that my team did when we first came to Hopkins was try to establish a relationship with a pharma company such that if any targets we identified were of interest to the company, we would develop a high-throughput screening assay, share that with the company, and they would screen using our assay and compound library,” she said.

“At the point that they find hits, they then transfer those back to my team here and we do all the drug discovery and chemistry to identify a compound to get to the clinic,” Slusher added. “At that point, Eisai has first rights to license that compound.”

“The exciting thing about this collaboration is that it is truly a win/win,” she continued. “From my perspective, academia is excellent at identifying new targets of therapeutic interest, but our screening ability is limited due to the size and quality of the compound libraries available. Our collaboration with Eisai gives us access to a real pharma library. From the Eisai side, the collaboration provides access to new targets and novel therapeutic approaches.”

Lynn Kramer, Eisai’s chief clinical officer and president of its Neuroscience and General Medicine Product Creation Unit (PCU), concurs, saying the JHU tie-up and a similar partnership with University College London, offer Eisai “a novel target identification program that incorporates early drug development.”

“For us, it expands the novelty of our programs and it’s designed to utilize the best skills from each of the two partners to facilitate drug development and pass the compounds back and forth between our strengths and their strengths,” he said. The Brain Science Institute is a little unique from an academic perspective in that it has a number of people who have a lot of drug-development experience in pharmacokinetics, medicinal chemistry, toxicology and animal models,” skills that increasingly are available in top academic medical centers as they try to move up the research value chain.

Lynn Kramer, Eisai

Slusher’s team sorts through the most-promising research from a consolidated team of about 550 researchers to find target prospects for Eisai. His company therefore has access to the most concentrated group of neuroscience researchers outside of Boston, but with a single point of contact and first rights to option programs, Kramer said. JHU advances the programs selected by Eisai as far as the IND-ready stage, with pre-arranged terms for licensing fees, milestones and royalties on those assets it takes in-house.

“Eisai has the ability at multiple stages to come in and acquire the project,” Slusher said. “Depending upon when they in-license, the value derived by the university varies. If Eisai in-licenses the drugs early in the process, Johns Hopkins derives less value than if they in-license late in the process. It’s correlative to the amount of effort we’ve put in.”

About 18 months into the collaboration, JHU has developed assays for the two targets, Eisai has conducted high-throughput screening and is now sending first hits back the university for the next stages of work. “We probably have a year or two of chemistry and drug discovery to do before leads will be identified as options for the company,” Slusher noted. “This whole process probably likely will take three to five years.”

Kramer would not specify Eisai’s internal goals for producing a first clinical candidate from the partnership, other than to say “our goal is in the not-too-distant future – by that I don’t mean in a year. This takes a while.”

In general, Kramer thinks further collaboration with academia will be beneficial for his company. ADDC, founded in 2012, intends to serve as a clearinghouse for both academia and industry on research taking place within U.S. and international drug research programs. It doesn’t do tech-transfer work itself, but aims to make it easier for academics and biopharmaceutical companies to work together.

“You see from our two associations that they’re very flexible,” Kramer said. “We have gotten away from a lot of the intellectual property issues that used to plague the industry, because we’re really interested in molecule IP, not target IP, which used to lead to years of back and forth and impaired academic development. By getting over that hurdle, I view the academic groups as our ‘bread-and-butter’ for novel targets. It’s very hard in the industry to develop a novel, previously unidentified target – it’s too expensive and takes too long.”

It wasn’t just the academic world that biopharma companies were dealing with this past week, though. Read on for …

Teva/NuPathe: Teva expects to launch the migraine patch Zecuity (sumatriptan iontrophoretic transdermal system) in the first half of 2014 after acquiring the developer, NuPathe. The two announced the acquisition plans Jan. 21, with Teva’s $3.65 per share offer, approximately $144 million upfront, trumping rival bidder Endo’s proposal of $3.15 per share. Teva, which needs near-term revenue generators, gains a new product to add to its specialty central nervous system portfolio. FDA already approved the drug in January 2013, but NuPathe held out on commercializing it in order to find a partner. The drug is the only patch approved for migraine. The Israeli pharma’s offer represents a significant 58% premium over the $2.30 NuPathe shares closed at on Dec. 13, the last business day before Endo announced its intentions to buy the company. But it doesn’t offer much financial reward for longer-term investors. NuPathe’s stock opened at $3.80 about a year ago, on Jan. 18, the day after Zecuity was approved by FDA. NuPathe investors could receive additional payments, however, of up to $3.15 per share based on the future sales performance of Zecuity. Investors will receive $2.15 per share if net sales of the product are at least $100 million in any four consecutive calendar quarters on or prior to the ninth anniversary launch date. Another $1.00 per share in cash is payable if sales are at least $300 million in any four calendar quarters over the same time period. - Jessica Merrill

Par Pharmaceuticals/JHP Pharmaceuticals: Par Pharmaceutical is looking to expand the types of generic drugs it can offer beyond the solid, oral-dose pills it has been producing for years. The Woodcliff Lakes, N.J.-based company announced Jan. 21 that is has entered into an agreement to acquire privately held JHP Pharmaceuticals for $490 million in cash, a 2.5x return on investment for JHP’s main investor, private equity firm Warburg Pincus. Par has arranged for $505 million in debt financing to cover the deal and related costs. JHP and all of its assets, including a sterile manufacturing facility in Rochester, MI, will become a wholly owned subsidiary once the deal closes later this quarter. JHP was launched in 2007 when it acquired biologics contract manufacturing assets acquired from King Pharmaceuticals (now part of Pfizer) for $92 million. JHP performs contract manufacturing services worldwide for pharma and biotech customers, producing sterile injectables that require liquid, lyophilized and suspension formulations. The King deal also included branded hospital and acute-care drugs that JHP distributes. The main appeal of JHP to Par is the 14 specialty injectables that it already has on the market, as well as 30 additional candidates it has in its pipeline. Par is looking to expand into high-barrier-to-entry injectable generics as some of the major players in that space falter due to manufacturing problems. - Lisa LaMotta

Biocon/Advaxis: India’s Biocon and New Jersey biotech Advaxis announced an exclusive licensing pact Jan. 22 for co-development and commercialization of ADXS-HPV, a novel cancer immunotherapy for treatment of human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated cervical cancer in women. The deal covers India and key Asian emerging markets and gives Biocon access to Advaxis’ innovative and proprietary technology for the development of other novel therapeutics. Advaxis recently completed Phase II clinical trials in patients with recurrent cervical cancer in India, and the immunotherapy also is being evaluated in three clinical trials for HPV-associated cancer like recurrent advanced cervical cancer, head and neck cancer, and anal cancer. A spokesperson for Advaxis said the company will receive double-digit royalties on all sales of its immunotherapy product. The biotech will have exclusive rights to supply ADXS-HPV to Biocon, and Biocon will be required to purchase its requirements of ADXS-HPV exclusively from Advaxis at the specified contract price, which may be adjusted periodically. In addition, Advaxis will be entitled to a “six-figure” milestone payment if net sales of ADXS-HPV for the contract year following the initiation of clinical trials in India exceed certain specified thresholds. - Vikas Dandekar

McKesson/Celesio: In a “No Deal” that has turned into a deal, 10 days after saying its proposed acquisition of German drug wholesaler Celesio had fallen through, U.S. drug wholesaler McKesson has reached agreements that will allow it to complete the purchase after all. McKesson launched its bid to greatly expand its global reach through Celesio in October 2013. However, on Jan. 13 it announced that the deal could not be completed due to its failure to acquire 75% of outstanding Celesio shares through a tender offer. Then, in a Jan. 23 release, McKesson said it had reached an agreement with Franz Haniel & Cie. GmbH to acquire its entire holding of Celesio shares at €23.50 per share and another agreement with an affiliate of Elliott Management to acquire Celesio convertible bonds, which will be enough to give McKesson more than 75% ownership of Celesio on a fully diluted basis. The transactions are expected to close within 10 business days. McKesson plans to launch a voluntary tender offer to purchase shares from the remaining minority shareholders shortly after the close of the other transactions. The company said it will consolidate the financial results of Celesio during its fiscal fourth quarter ending March 31, and McKesson’s earnings will reflect its proportionate share of Celesio’s earnings. It expects to realize annual synergies of between $275 million to $325 million four years after the close of the deal. - Scott Steinke



Photo credits: Johns Hopkins University, Eisai Co. Ltd.

Deals Of The Week: Academic Drug-Discovery Alliance Capturing Industry's Notice

Nashville hosted the first annual conference of the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium

It’s become a familiar story in biopharma, as Big Pharma X announces that in the wake of the patent cliff, health care-spending pressures in Europe and diminished returns from internal R&D, it will be forced to cut back on R&D spending and make staff reductions primarily in sales and lab positions.

As the industry retrenches on early drug-discovery work, however, the need for innovation has not diminished and so the private sector frequently looks more and more to the academy for early research breakthroughs that might translate into therapies that will bolster the quarterly earnings reports a decade from now. In an effort to take advantage of that trend, some of the more forward-thinking university-based drug-discovery outfits in the U.S. have banded together to create a consortium they hope will facilitate and ease partnerships between academic institutions and the biopharmaceutical industry.

The brainchild of a meeting in Baltimore two autumns ago, the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium was more or less dreamed up by Barbara Slusher, director of the Translational Program at the Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and Jeffrey Conn, director of the Vanderbilt Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery, with input from three other founding institutions: University of North Carolina, Harvard University and University of California, San Francisco.

But in a relatively short time, ADDC’s membership has grown to 83 institutions, including six outside the U.S., and more than 550 individual members. And, just as importantly, big pharma has taken notice.

“They started out with two groups, Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins, and now they have 83 members,” said Bruce Harris, Roche’s director of academic alliances and an attendee and speaker at ADDC’s first annual conference Oct. 9-11 in Nashville.” All of these institutions are trying to incorporate drug discovery and translate some of the biological discoveries occurring in their laboratories into drug-discovery projects and, if you think about it, that’s an incredible resource for the industry and the early portion of our pipelines.”

It is a necessary development as well. “The area I work in, CNS, probably has been hit the hardest because it’s a risk area where companies are decreasing their internal efforts and several companies have just gotten out (altogether),” said Slusher, co-founder and president of ADDC.

She and Harris both point to an increased government funding interest in translational research that has occurred more or less in tandem with private industry’s cutbacks in discovery work. Specifically, they site the NIH Roadmap efforts undertaken during the tenure of former NIH Director Elias Zerhouni. “This has been a major change in the pharmaceutical industry,” Slusher said. “But as pharma has been decreasing some of its internal efforts, simultaneously what you see is NIH increasing its interest in activities in discovery and translation.”

While overall NIH funding has been roughly flat in recent years, she noted, funding for its National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) was increased by 11% for federal fiscal year 2013.

ADDC also reflects the exponential growth taking place in academic drug discovery. There were six U.S. academic institutions performing drug-discovery research in 1990, a number that had nearly tripled as of a decade ago. Now, there are more than 100 such units, and 78 of them have membership in ADDC, Slusher pointed out.

In addition to its domestic members, ADDC also has drawn the support of six international research outfits – the Centre of Applied Medical Research at the University of Navarra in Spain, the Karolinska Institute’s Chemical Biology Consortium Sweden, the genetic engineering and biotechnology labs at Shaqra University in Saudi Arabia, the Platform of Chemical Biology and ADME at the University of Strasbourg in France, the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre and Cancer Research UK.

While ADDC has a focus on facilitating partnerships with the private sector, Harris thinks another important role it can play is fostering research efforts across national borders. “I could easily see these U.S.-based academic institutions collaborating on drug-discovery work with their European colleagues,” he said. “Science is global and so are economies, so for them to work together without national boundaries is just natural.”

As Roche searches for programs and assets to invest in at the academic level, Harris said his emphasis will be on the company’s therapeutic areas of focus – oncology, neuroscience and infectious disease. Those priorities dovetail well with what is occurring in U.S. academic research – of the ADDC centers, 73% say they work in oncology, 65% in infectious disease, 63% in neurological disorders and 45% in immunology.

One of ADDC’s initial goals is to create a searchable database of the projects being undertaken by member institutions. Both institutional and individual membership in ADDC is free, meaning this should be a significant resource for academic alliance seekers, like Roche’s Harris. (The organization also is not planning to take a cut from members’ tech transfer deals as a funding mechanism. Instead, it has lined up more than 20 biopharma and service provider firms to sponsor ADDC activities so far, Slusher said.)

Meanwhile, ADDC has no plans, in the near term at least, to serve as a central negotiating point for tech transfer deals or to develop uniform documents and practices for such transactions. Harris said right now that activity seems neither necessary nor terribly feasible.

“I’m not sure that it would be useful to standardize all of the legal documents and arrangements because each university has its own mission within a given state or [based upon] who is supporting it,” Harris added. “They have to go by their own regulations, so having a common set of documents across multiple tech transfer offices at U.S. universities would be a monumental challenge, I think, and probably expensive from a legal point of view.”

And while we await a slew of deals between ADDC member institutions and the biopharma industry, we present this week’s roundup of ....

MedImmune/Spirogen/ADC Therapeutics: AstraZeneca’s biologics unit MedImmune will expand its early oncology pipeline with a new platform to make potent antibody-drug conjugates through the acquisition of U.K.-based Spirogen. Britain’s second-biggest drug maker said it was acquiring privately held Spirogen Oct. 15, paying up $200 million upfront and with another $240 million in potential earn-outs based on predefined milestones for Spirogen’s ADC technology, which has the potential to directly target cancer tumors while protecting healthy cells. Spirogen has developed a novel class of cytotoxic “warheads” based on pyrrolobenzodiazepine (PBDs), which are DNA minor-grove binding agents that bind to specific sites of DNA in cancer cells, according to MedImmune. This blocks the cell division and growth without distorting the DNA helix of cancer cells, which potentially could prevent the emergence of drug resistance. AstraZeneca is in the midst of a concerted push in oncology under the direction of CEO Pascal Soriot, who has revamped the company’s R&D direction over the past year and selected oncology as one of three focal therapeutic areas for the company. MedImmune now is focused on two key areas in oncology development – ADCs and immune-mediated cancer therapy – and says the acquisition of Spirogen fits that strategy perfectly. In connection with the deal, AstraZeneca simultaneously announced a coinciding agreement with Swiss-based ADC Therapeutics, which has a licensing agreement with Spirogen. Under that arrangement AstraZeneca will pay $20 million to take an equity investment in the company. The investment will be matched by Auven Therapeutics, the majority shareholder in both ADC Therapeutics and Spirogen. AstraZeneca will collaborate with ADC Therapeutics to develop two programs from a defined list and pay an undisclosed upfront payment and development milestones. ADC Therapeutics will have a profit-sharing arrangement and gets the option to co-promote one of the products in the U.S. The products to be developed using Spirogen’s technology are preclinical assets, so the latest deal will not yield commercially viable new medicines for several years. It is not yet clear when the products could move forward into clinical tests. Spirogen has been developing its PBD technology for more than 10 years, including a standalone PBD agent in a Phase II study in acute myeloid leukemia. Its business model has been to partner its technology with pharma and biotech for use in the development of novel drugs. It has a number of industry collaborations, including collaborations with Genmab in June 2013, Genentech in 2011 and with ADC Therapeutics announced in 2012. - Sten Stovall

AstraZeneca/Taris Biomedical: Bladder-disease focused Taris Biomedical signed a research agreement with AstraZeneca Oct. 16 to work on novel treatments for bladder cancer. No financial details were disclosed, but the pharma gets an option to license any products resulting from the collaboration. The partnership will involve using Taris’ proprietary delivery platform in combination with targeted bladder cancer drugs developed by AstraZeneca. The Lexington, Mass.-based biotech says its technology involves a soft and flexible device that is deployed into and retrieved from the patient’s bladder “using standard urological office procedures.” The technology is designed to provide continuous local delivery of a therapeutic agent to the bladder for days or weeks. “Their novel technology has the potential to enable the delivery of the right drugs to the tumor tissue in the right concentration and over a prolonged period,” said Susan Galbraith, head of AstraZeneca’s Oncology Innovative Medicines Unit in a release. “This could combine the ability to target the right tissue – the tumor – with the right genetically targeted therapy and therefore represent a step change in the treatment of this disease.” Taris is a clinical-stage firm focused on developing therapies for bladder cancer, overactive bladder and interstitial cystitis. Its lead candidate, LiRIS, is in Phase II in interstitial cystitis. In April, the biotech raised $12.5 million in a Series C round funded by returning investors Flagship Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Polaris Partners and Third Rock Ventures. - Joseph Haas

AmpliPhi Biosciences/University of Leicester: U.S. company AmpliPhi BioSciences announced an agreement Oct. 17 with a British academic group that has succeeded in identifying and characterizing bacteriophage (“phage”) that kill pathogenic strains of Clostridium difficile, a major cause of hospital-acquired severe diarrhea and vomiting. The University of Leicester  researchers will collaborate with AmpliPhi and another U.K. research team at the University of Glasgow on using the “bacteria-eating viruses” for clinical applications, with AmpliPhi funding the research, making milestone payments and paying royalties on any eventual products sales. In return, AmpliPhi receives rights to patents and intellectual property covering the Clostridium difficile-targeted phage research.
In a September 2013 report, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention called C difficile an urgent threat, causing 250,000 infections every year in the U.S. AmpliPhi believes it is conducting the only phage-based development program for this critical condition. Phage could yield ideal candidates for treating gastrointestinal infections, as they infect and kill a specific strain or species of bacteria, and should not affect beneficial gut bacteria. The research agreement is the third by AmpliPhi in the past six months, having linked up previously with the synthetic biology company Intrexon and the U.S Army. AmpliPhi expects its first therapeutic phage-based product, targeting Staphylococcus aureus and developed in collaboration with the U.S. military, to enter clinical trials next year. AmpliPhi is headquartered in Richmond, Va., but has operations in Colworth, U.K., and Sydney, Australia. - John Davis

Zydus Cadila/Pieris: India’s Zydus Cadila is teaming with Germany’s Pieris to develop and commercialize multiple novel protein therapeutics derived from the anticalin protein molecule. In an Oct. 16 announcement, the companies said the partnership would combine Pieris capabilities in drug discovery and early drug development with Zydus’ expertise in regulatory affairs and development and manufacturing of biologics. No financial terms were disclosed, but the companies said in a release that they will share licensing revenues under mutually agreed-upon terms. The collaboration is intended to develop candidates to proof-of-concept and then seek out-licensing in Pieris’ commercial territories. The most advanced program under the partnership is PRS-110, an anticalin protein specific for c-MET, a target that has been validated in a broad spectrum of tumor types. The candidate is a pure antagonist due to monovalent target engagement and in animal models has demonstrated the ability to inhibit ligand-dependent and –independent c-MET activity. - J.A.H.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Deals of the Week: For Astex Shareholders, Will 8 1/2 Do?

A month after Otsuka Pharmaceutical agreed to buy cancer drug developer Astex Pharmaceuticals for $886 million, a top shareholder is challenging the deal. Sarissa Capital Management issued an open letter Oct. 2 to announce its opposition, lamenting a price it found underwhelming, an auction process it found flawed, and an executive team whose motivations it believes to be suspect. A separate shareholder class action is already pending, alleging that the deal won’t deliver fair value as proposed.

Sarissa is a life science-focused hedge fund operated by Alex Denner and Richard Mulligan, onetime associates of activist investor Carl Icahn. The fund’s operators believe its 5% stake in Astex is worth more than the $8.50 per share Otsuka agreed to pay in the Sept. 4 deal, and the firm is not planning to tender its shares. Moreover, the firm expressed surprise at the deal’s timing, saying it was “inexplicable and disturbing” that Astex would sell before it reveals key Phase I/II clincal data from oncology candidate SGI110 in December, with more data to come in 2014. The drug has shown promise in acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndromes.

The letter also alleged that Astex failed to engage all potential bidders, and favored terms that would keep existing structures intact while rewarding top executives with individual long-term compensation incentives. Sarissa’s co-founders called the executive-retention terms “extraordinarily upsetting,” said the executives’ intentions were compromised, and accused management of trying to “hide important issues about [their] motivations."

Astex fired back with its own open letter Oct. 2. The Dublin, Calif.-based company described a sale process in which 33 potential suitors were engaged and five showed serious interest, but only Otsuka submitted a final proposal. Astex says it negotiated the $8.50 price up from $7.75, and received interest from another buyer in the $6 to $7 range. (Shares hovered between $5 and $6 for most of July and August.) Astex claims it hasn’t received any competing buyout offers since the Otsuka deal was revealed last month, and denied that it had discussed specific employee retention arrangements with the Japanese buyer.

Most of Astex’s speculative value is tied up in pipeline drugs SGI110, a DNA hypomethylating agent that reactivates gene expression, suppressing tumor cell growth; and AT13387, an HSP90 inhibitor targeting multiple cancers. The company also reaps royalties on sales of Dacogen (decitabine) for myelodysplastic syndromes, sold by Eisai in North America and Janssen Cilag elsewhere.

Could a solution come in the form of a contingent value right that could add a further payout to a deal long after it’s consummated? Astex’s SGI110 data presentation at December’s American Society of Hematology conference represents a near-term milestone that could tempt both sides to settle for a contingency, but SGI110 and AT13387 still have a long way to go. The two sides would have to settle soon; Otsuka’s offer is set to expire Oct. 10. Stalling might work, too. If the current deal falls apart but the December data are encouraging, additional suitors could line up as potential buyers or partners. Astex could then command a much higher price, with a somewhat de-risked asset in its pipeline. And even in the short term, the suggestion that Astex could be worth more might compel more shareholders to get on board with Sarissa’s demands. - Paul Bonanos

Even if your life isn't just like a Fellini film, we hope you enjoy la dolce vita this weekend. And please enjoy...

Johnson & Johnson/Effimune/Merus/CureVac/DCPrime: J&J's London Innovation Center announced deals between the Big Pharma and four European biotech companies on Oct. 3, timed to coincide with a meeting between J&J researchers and UK political and research movers-and-shakers at the six-month-old center. The center is one of four ICs around the world, set up to invest or collaborate with academics, entrepreneurs and early-stage companies. All four deals were concluded with help from the IC. In the first, J&J's Janssen Biotech Inc. entered into a global option and license agreement with French company Effimune concerning a preclinical pegylated anti-CD28 antibody fragment, FR104, which has potential in immune-mediated disorders. If the option is exercised, Janssen will make milestone payments and pre-specified royalty payments on worldwide net sales of the product. In the second deal, Utrecht, Netherlands-based Merus has received an equity investment from J&J Development Corporation as part of a €31 million ($42 million) extension to a Series B financing round that now totals €47.6 million. Existing investors include two other corporate investors, the Novartis Venture Fund and Pfizer Venture Investments, as well as Bay City Capital, Life Science Partners and Aglaia Oncology Fund. Merus is building a pipeline of single cell-derived human bispecific antibodies for use in cancer therapy. In the third deal, Germany's CureVac will collaborate with Janssen Pharmaceutica Inc.'s Crucell Holland to develop an influenza vaccine based on CureVac's RNActive technology. And lastly, the Leiden, Netherlands-based DCPrime BV has entered into a research collaboration and optional license agreement with Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc. on a potential dendritic cell-based vaccine; one candidate has completed a Phase I/IIa trial in acute myeloid leukemia. - John Davis

Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute: With a personnel contribution from Takeda Pharmaceutical, three New York-based academic research institutions will team up to create the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (Tri-I TDI), a non-profit organization that will seek to expedite advancement of basic biomedical research into innovative therapies and treatments across a broad spectrum of therapeutic areas, including cancer. Initial work will focus on small molecules, but eventually the institute plans to branch out into monoclonal antibodies and molecular imaging agents. Announced Oct. 1 in New York City, the collaboration will bring together under one roof researchers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University and Cornell University’s Weill Cornell Medical College. This is hardly the first time these three institutions have come together for a joint research initiative. In 2011, each was among seven New York research institutes electing to partner with Pfizer in an initiative to apply open innovation toward the development of biologic therapies across all therapeutic areas. In addition, each institution has pursued its own tech-transfer deals with private industry over the years. The institute begins its work with $20 million in philanthropic funding. It has received a $15 million grant from Lewis and Ali Sanders and $5 million from Howard and Abby Milstein. In addition, the three institutions will make equal contributions to an operating budget, while Takeda’s initial investment will be in the form of medicinal chemists based at the institute. Carl Nathan, chairman of Weill Cornell’s department of microbiology and immunology, said Takeda’s participation will be unusual, in that the personnel it lends to the effort will perform medicinal chemistry and take those processes much farther along than would be possible at the academic level, but without any guarantee of an economic benefit to the Japanese pharma. - Joseph Haas

Intrexon/Sun: Fresh off an August initial public offering that raised $184 million, synthetic biology specialist Intrexon created a  joint venture with India’s Sun Pharmaceutical to discover and develop new drugs for eye disorders. The companies plan to unite Intrexon’s technology platform, including the proprietary RheoSwitch Therapeutic System to control protein expression, with Sun’s global specialty pharma development and manufacturing expertise, and target chronic disorders such as “dry” age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, and retinitis pigmentosa. Intrexon’s business model is built on partnerships, typically providing novel in vivo and ex vivo biological engineering techniques to another company with a specialized area of focus. (It struck a separate deal with Oragenics this week, concerning new therapies for oral, throat, sinus and esophagus disorders.) Led by billionaire Randal J. Kirk, Germantown, Md.-based Intrexon has struck at least eleven deals since its formation in 2007 as GT Life Sciences. Financial details weren’t released, and neither Intrexon nor Sun would comment beyond a statement. It’s not clear whether the two parties are equal owners, nor whether they invested equal amounts. Although they will share in the profits, it’s also unclear how decisions guiding the JV will be made. - P.B.

Enteris/Nordic Bioscience: Enteris BioPharma inked its first-ever licensing deal, just three months after it was formed from the assets of defunct Unigene Laboratories. The Boonton, N.J.-based company licensed its proprietary oral formulation platform, Peptelligence, to Nordic Bioscience subsidiary KeyBioScience Sept. 30, in order to develop oral versions of peptide drugs targeting metabolic diseases. Terms weren’t released, although Enteris acknowledged that it will receive both fee-for-service payments and royalties on any products that result from the deal. Nordic previously formed a joint venture with Enteris’s predecessor in 2011, studying Unigene’s calcitonin analogs for type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis and osteoporosis. Chicago hedge fund Victory Park Capital is the sole owner and funder of Enteris. The company was launched after Unigene, hobbled by debt and by negative regulatory decisions, was sold in pieces.  The company believed that Unigene had neglected technologies such as Peptelligence all along, and hopes potential partners will see its value in extending drug franchises with convenient formulations and renewed patent life. - Lisa LaMotta

Celgene/PharmAkea: Celgene is making a habit out of equity/option deals. The Summit, N.J. drugmaker’s latest arrangement gives it an opportunity to buy PharmAkea Therapeutics, a small-molecule discovery company created last year to develop drugs for fibroproliferative diseases. Celgene will invest $35 million over three years, take an equity stake in PharmAkea, and hold an exclusive option to acquire it.  The companies will explore three targets concerning connective tissue and the link between fibrotic disease and cancer. PharmAkea believes it can begin Phase I trials on two programs within three years; Celgene holds the option to extend the arrangement for 18 months or buy the company outright. The deal was announced simultaneously with PharmAkea’s $10 million Series A funding from Bay City Capital. It’s a now-familiar strategy for Celgene, a company that took a similar option to buy Quanticel Pharmaceuticals for $45 million after Versant Ventures incubated the company for several months in 2011. Celgene also paid $100 million for an exclusive option to acquire five-year-old epigenetics drug developer Acetylon Pharmaceuticals in July, after investing in the company’s Series B round previously. Celgene seeded PharmAkea last year, allowing it to recruit a management team that includes several executives from Amira Pharmaceuticals, sold to Bristol-Myers Squibb for $325 million upfront in 2011, and BrainCells Inc. - P.B.

Financings of the Fortnight Keeps Its Dauber Up

Baseball fanatics out there might remember Roger Craig, a pitcher for the hapless expansion 1962 New York Metropolitans, then much later the manager of several memorable San Francisco Giants teams in the 1980s. As the San Fran skipper, Craig was a spinner of many homespun threads. The one that sticks with most Giants fans of a certain age was Craig’s catch-all pick-me-up: Don’t get your dauber down.

No one has yet to spot a dauber, much less one that’s down, but we all got the message. Baseball’s a long play, as you financial types might say. Don’t let the small sample sizes harsh your mellow. Case in point: DowJones VentureSource just released its first-quarter venture data, and everything, at first glance, is down: Money in (fundraising), money out (investment), and money recouped (IPOs and M&A activity). It was the lowest amount of venture investment in three years, and the fewest acquisitions since 2009.

That’s for all venture sectors; but there were bright spots in our little corner of the world. For example, a life-science specific VC survey from law firm Fenwick & West says in 2012 up rounds outnumbered down rounds 52% to 17%, an uptick from a 47%-25% ratio in 2011.

And despite increasing reluctance of life-science VCs to invest in new companies, the quarter’s second-largest fund raised was Third Rock Ventures’ new $516 million vehicle, its third (might we suggest T-shirts that say “III ROCK III”?). The folks at Fenwick have crunched fundraising data from DowJones and other sources and estimate that those earmarked for life-science investment are in decline, from $3 billion in 2011 to $2.5 billion in 2012. With Third Rock III – a pure life sciences play -- by Fenwick’s measure we’re already 20% of the way to last year’s total.

According to DowJones, biopharmaceuticals accounted for $938 million, about half the health care total, and right in the middle of the 13 quarterly totals rung up since the start of 2010. So take the overall venture drop with a spoonful of sugar: there have been far worse quarters in the past few years, such as the $583 million invested in Q1 2012. In fact, have a little more sugar: Broken down by industry subsector, “biotechnology therapeutics” beat out “online communities” as the biggest breadwinner with $476 million invested. (The gap between that and the $938 million attributed to “biopharmaceuticals” goes to show how much extra stuff, like diagnostics and specialty pharma, VentureSource lumps into the biopharmaceuticals category.)

With all the bustle in the IPO hedgerow the past two weeks, we think the VentureSource first-quarter overview seems prematurely grim. VentureSource tallied nine IPOs total, but that seems low. By our own count, there were seven through March 31 in health care alone, four of which were biopharmaceuticals. (Enanta, TetraPhase, KaloBios, and Stemline Therapeutics). Add to that this fortnight’s issues, Omthera Pharmaceuticals and Chimerix (see below), plus a burgeoning backlog of companies (Portola Pharmaceuticals, Epizyme, Receptos, and more) looking to break through to the public markets, and the outlook has begun to brighten. It’s not just the queue; it’s the fact that Chimerix broke the $100 million mark, a rare feat for a biotech IPO. Granted, it had help from existing investors, as did Omthera, but that’s been par for the course since the Great Recession receded. Nine digits is nine digits.

For all the venture capital that flowed into biotech this quarter, perhaps our favorite slice was the mere $15,000 that helped launch Cortera, the brain-child of students at the University of California, San Francisco. (Team leader Connie Cheung, whose winning presentation can be seen here, tells the IN VIVO Blog the name will soon change to Spiria.) They won a competition tied to the school’s entrepreneurship course, and the seed funding was provided by Burrill & Co., whose chief Steve Burrill is one of the course’s directors. The Spiria team says it has a brain-mapping system for neurosurgeons that’s faster and safer than established methods. If that holds true, they’ve got excellent timing; the National Institutes of Health is coordinating a brain-mapping effort, and GlaxoSmithKline has pledged to seed up to 20 academic labs doing early work that could lead to ‘electroceutical’ therapies, or the alteration of biological function through electrical pulses instead of chemicals or biologics. The latest edition of Start-Up will have a fuller explanation.

While you’re in a Start-Up mood, check out our colleague Stacy Lawrence's coverage of VCs doing rather un-venture-like things: funding late-stage drug trials on behalf of Big Pharma. The drug stays with the Pharma owner while the fees, milestone payments and (if all goes well) sales royalties flow to the VCs and their LPs. If the model grows beyond the handful of venture firms giving it a go, the metrics of venture exits might need re-thinking, because the entities the VCs set up to run the trial aren’t necessarily meant to go public or be acquired.

Finally, we send our thoughts and respect to the folks in Boston and West, Texas, each dealing with tragedy this week. Boston is home to much of our readership, and one effort to fundraise on behalf of the bombing’s victims and their families is getting a big push from the local tech and venture crowd, with an assist from the writers of Fortune’s Term Sheet. Thanks to all who refuse to get their daubers down.

And who knows, perhaps we’ll figure out what a dauber is by the time we get to the end of the latest installment of…

Cleave Biosciences: The early-stage oncology company has reeled in New Enterprise Associates to join its Series A syndicate, bumping the round that started in 2011 to $54 million without a clinical candidate in sight. NEA joins US Venture Partners, 5AM Ventures, Clarus Ventures, OrbiMed and Astellas Venture Management, as well as Osage University Partners, which joined later with a $2 million investment tied to its relationship with UNIV TK. (For more on the unique Osage strategy, click here.) Cleave was formed around three novel targets discovered in the Cal Tech lab of Raymond Deshaies, who co-founded Proteolix with USVP partner and Cleave board member Larry Lasky. Cleave’s initial Series A draw of $44 million and its exploration of protein homeostasis landed it a spot on START-UP’s 2011 A-List. It expects the Series A cash to last two or three more years and push a first drug candidate – not yet identified -- into the clinic. Other compounds addressing protein homeostasis have gained commercial approval for multiple myeloma, Millennium Pharmaceuticals’ Velcade (bortezomib) and Onyx Pharmaceuticals’ Kyprolis (carfilzomib), which came to Onyx when it bought Proteolix in 2009. Cleave will first pursue a proof-of-concept trial in multiple myeloma. Armed with its novel targets, however, the firm believes it can apply its compounds to solid tumors. NEA’s Robert Garland will take a seat on the board.– Lisa LaMotta

Anacor Pharmaceuticals: The Palo Alto, Calif. firm has had enough success discovering drugs with its boron chemistry platform that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will fund new programs to discover treatments for two worm diseases and tuberculosis. The foundation will pay Anacor $17.7 million and take a $5 million equity stake, the latest biotech investment the world’s largest charitable group has made as part of a recent initiative. (Our Start-Up colleagues wrote about it here.) Beyond the programs for river blindness and elephantiasis, both caused by parasitic worms, and tuberculosis, Anacor will also use the Gates money to expand its library of boron compounds to screen for more neglected-disease treatments and open the library to the Gates Foundation and other nonprofit, governmental and academic researchers. Anacor’s lead compound is tavaborole to treat onychomychosis, a type of toenail fungus, and preliminary Phase III data were released earlier this year. The firm plans to file an NDA for tavaborole in mid-2013. The $22.7 million infusion from Gates nearly matches the largest fundraisings Anacor has managed since its 2010 IPO. In 2012 it raised secondary financings of $20 million and $23 million, and it has also brought in smaller amounts via private placement and alliance. – Alex Lash

Chimerix: No wonder the IPO pipeline keeps filling up. Conditions for new issues are improving, which allowed antiviral drug developer Chimerix to boost the number of shares in its offering while maintaining a strong price. Chimerix raised $107.4 million in its April 11 offering, selling 8.4 million shares at $14 apiece. The company had previously said it would aim to sell 6.1 million shares between $13 and $15 each, but it responded to high demand and fulfilled its underwriters’ greenshoe option by selling more shares within the same price range. The company will conduct Phase III trials on lead candidate CMX001, a broad-spectrum oral lipid conjugate of antiviral drug cidofovir (sold by Gilead as Vistide) to treat cytomegalovirus in patients who have undergone hematopoietic stem cell transplants. Chimerix is also investigating the drug to combat other double-stranded DNA viruses such as adenovirus, herpes simplex virus and BK virus, as well as smallpox. The company has a partnership with Merck around CMX157, another lipid conjugate targeting HIV. Chimerix shares rose 34% in their first day of trading to close at $18.79, and spent most of the week between $18 and $19.50. – Paul Bonanos

Auris Medical: The Swiss firm said April 16 it has attracted a chunky $50.4 million in a Series C financing, the most raised by a private biotech in Europe so far this year. With two Phase III-ready candidates for tinnitus and acute hearing loss, Auris has a pioneering position in new drugs for hearing disorders. The cash will be used to move them through to registration, the firm said. AM-101 is being developed for the treatment of acute tinnitus, and AM-111 for the treatment of inner ear hearing loss, and both have completed Phase IIb proof-of-concept studies. The compounds are formulated in a biocompatible gel and given by intratympanic injection, through the eardrum, and they then rely on passive diffusion to reach their site of action in the cochlea. Developing new otologic drugs hasn't attracted the same amount of attention as new ophthalmic drugs, even though hearing loss is more common than declining sight. The cochlea, or inner ear, is tiny and difficult to get at, and there are a plethora of hearing aids and implants already available to address the commonest hearing disorder, the age-related loss of hearing associated with a lifetime of loud noises and other adverse events. When Auris CEO and founder Thomas Meyer started out in 2003, he funded the company himself, and found it difficult to convince others of his seriousness. The new round shows his persistence has paid off, and other efforts have also recently emerged. The funds come from Paris-based Sofinnova Partners and US-based Sofinnova Ventures, two firms with common ancestry but which are otherwise independent of each other. – John Davis

All The Rest: GenSight Biologics closed a $40M Series A to support ophthalmic gene therapies… Syros Pharma raised $30M in a Series A for its work on novel gene control medicines… Allecra Therapeutics, a 2013 start-up collaborating with Orchid on overcoming bacterial resistance to antibiotics, completed a €15M Series A co-led by Edmond de Rothschild and Forbion... Dievini Hopp Bio Tech Holding provided a €13.9M Series E for topical drug delivery company Novaliq… Orphan drug accelerator Cydan raised $16M… InnoBio and Sofinnova Partners were the investors on neuro-metabolic-focused MedDay’s €8M Series A… Merck Serono Ventures led a £2.1M round for Canbex Therapeutics… Beat BioTherapeutics was seeded with $2.5M to fund a gene therapeutic for heart failure…Seraxis, working on cell therapies for Type I diabetes, raised an undisclosed amount in Series A financing… Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund reportedly provided Series B financing for Eyevensys… University of Copenhagen spin-off Avilex received seed funding from Novo Seeds… GI therapeutics company Synergy publicly sold $90M worth of common stock… Omthera grossed $64M in its IPO... Chemokine-targeting ChemoCentryx closed a $60M FOPO… Less than a year after completing an IPO, Durata Therapeutics raised $50M in a secondary offering… Oncology tests and services firm Cancer Genetics raised $6.9M in its IPO after postponing and refilling multiple times… ADMA Biologics, which reverse merged and became a public reporting entity via the Form 10 process, amended its IPO terms… Harvard Apparatus Regenerative Technology postponed its IPO… VistaGen raised $36M from a subsidiary of Bergamo Acquisition Corp. … RNAi platform company Silence Therapeutics completed a £19M PIPE… To support Phase IIb trials of diabetes candidate GFT505, Genfit raised €14.3M… Lincoln Park Capital Fund might invest up to $18.5M in Anthera, which also signed a $20M debt financing with MidCap Financial… MEI Pharma will use $15.2M in PIPE proceeds for lead candidate pracinostat for advanced hematologic malignancies… Jennison Associates invested $10.1M in Coronado Biosciences… OxiGene sold $5M in zero coupon convertible preferred stock… Resverlogix is spinning off RVX Therapeutics to focus on an epigenetics platform in autoimmune disease and cancer… StemCells got a $10M loan from Silicon Valley Bank. -- Amanda Micklus