Out to prove the next big I/O target, Immunitas’ chief dealmaker steps up to CEO role

To Aman­da Wag­n­er, the past two years or so she’s spent at Im­mu­ni­tas feels like a mi­cro­cosm of her en­tire ca­reer up to now.

Trained in neu­ro­science and equipped with an MBA, Wag­n­er’s 16-year bio­phar­ma ca­reer could be split in­to a first half in R&D and a sec­ond in cor­po­rate fi­nance and busi­ness de­vel­op­ment. She was con­sult­ing for the Long­wood Fund in 2019 when the VC firm pulled her aside to talk about a new im­muno-on­col­o­gy com­pa­ny it was in­cu­bat­ing. ‘I was like, we can do I/O, but it has to be re­al­ly high­ly dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed,’ she re­called.

She was in­vit­ed to check out the da­ta for her­self. In a pa­per that would even­tu­al­ly be pub­lished in Cell, co-founder Kai Wucherpfen­nig and his lab showed how, us­ing a sin­gle-cell se­quenc­ing and analy­sis plat­form, they iden­ti­fied a new I/O tar­get — CD161 — that can re­store the can­cer-killing pow­er of both ef­fec­tor mem­o­ry T cells and NK cells.

And now that’s got her hooked for the long haul. Af­ter two years as chief busi­ness of­fi­cer, Wag­n­er will be tak­ing over the wheels as CEO.

‘I’ve played mul­ti­ple hats with the com­pa­ny, as you do at most star­tups,’ she said. ‘When I first came on board, my pri­ma­ry role was to look at clin­i­cal in­di­ca­tion strat­e­gy, and to think about where the best fit would be for the bi­ol­o­gy. And I’m a big be­liev­er, in gen­er­al, of best fit bi­ol­o­gy. And so I worked on the in­di­ca­tion pri­or­i­ti­za­tion and built out the de­vel­op­ment team, and then tran­si­tioned in­to look­ing at busi­ness de­vel­op­ment and part­ner­ing and the Se­ries B fi­nanc­ing.’ Her pro­mo­tion, which fol­lows the re­cent close of a $58 mil­lion round, comes as a nat­ur­al tran­si­tion up­on the res­ig­na­tion of Jef­frey Gold­berg, her pre­de­ces­sor and for­mer COO at Akcea. Over the course of grow­ing the biotech, Wag­n­er said, Gold­berg came to re­al­ize he was much more in­ter­est­ed in things like pa­tient ac­cess, mar­ket ac­cess re­im­burse­ment and com­mer­cial po­si­tion­ing. Im­mu­ni­tas was too ear­ly.

With Im­mu­ni­tas be­ing her fourth start­up (the last was an At­las-backed, au­toim­mune fo­cused com­pa­ny that’s yet to emerge from stealth), Wag­n­er’s march­ing or­ders are push­ing as hard as the biotech’s 25 staffers can get to put the lead CD161 com­pound in­to the clin­ic while scal­ing out the plat­form and ex­pand­ing the pipeline in the back­ground — the kind of trans­la­tion­al work that’s ex­act­ly in her wheel­house.

‘I find that the pri­or­i­ties for ear­ly stage biotech tend to be very sim­i­lar in the first few years,’ she said.

With an IND for the lead pro­gram planned for the first half of 2022, Wag­n­er said she’s tak­ing over at an ‘ex­cit­ing growth mo­ment.’ Im­mu­ni­tas is al­ready in­ter­view­ing for her re­place­ment in BD, scout­ing part­ners on every­thing from the CD161 drug — which it thinks has much broad­er ap­pli­ca­tions than glioma, where it was ini­tial­ly shown to have an ef­fect — to fol­low-up can­di­dates and dis­cov­ery projects.

‘We’re the strongest we’ve ever been,’ she said.

For years, paper-based processes and individual point solutions dominated the clinical research landscape, and patient participation in clinical trials was largely an in-person engagement. But when the COVID-19 pandemic took a stronghold, traditional clinical trial methods emerged as inadequate, putting clinical trials and the life sciences industry at a crossroads. Practically overnight, the industry had to rapidly shift to decentralized clinical trial methods, while maintaining data quality and regulatory compliance.

Al Sandrock (Biogen via Youtube)

Two years after Al Sandrock jumped from CMO to the top post in R&D — and just months after the hyper-controversial approval of the experimental Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab (Aduhelm) — Sandrock is planning to step out of his long career at Biogen.

Late Monday evening the big biotech put out word that Sandrock, a longtime fixture in the company after a 23-year stint, is hitting the exit.

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Glen de Vries (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

Glen de Vries, the co-founder of the clinical IT software giant Medidata Solutions, died in a plane crash last week.

Emergency crews found the wreckage of a Cessna 172 in a wooded area in northern New Jersey on Thursday. De Vries was an instrument-rated private pilot, though authorities have not yet said who was piloting the plane. He was with his flight instructor Thomas Fischer, 54, and the plane was headed to Sussex Airport from Essex County Airport in Caldwell. He had started his private pilot training with Fischer in February 2016. Fischer opened the flight school with his wife Jodi in March 2012.

Steve Pearson, ICER president (Jeff Rumans for Endpoints News)

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review on Tuesday morning released its latest on ‘unsupported’ drug price increases for seven top treatments, and how even after rebates and other concessions, these increases cost the US health system an additional $1.67 billion, including almost $1.4 billion from AbbVie’s Humira alone.

The authors of the report winnowed down a list of the top 250 drugs with the largest US net sales revenue in 2020 to just 10 drugs and assessed whether there was even the potential for evidentiary support to back the price increases.

Shao-Lee Lin, Acelyrin CEO

When Acelyrin closed its Series A late last year, it was met with little fanfare. The biotech had only two employees, the former R&D chief and CBO of Horizon Therapeutics, and didn’t even disclose the size of the raise. Westlake Village BioPartners, an LA-based VC firm and lead investor, proved the most noteworthy aspect of the announcement, having spawned from ex-Amgen R&D head Sean Harper and ex-Kleiner Perkins life sciences director Beth Seidenberg.

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Demand for life science real estate is surging in China — and one of Asia’s largest investment groups is rising to the call.

CBC Group — the startup engine that recently lured in Merck’s former R&D chief Roger Perlmutter — is joining forces with Netherlands Pension provider APG Asset Management to launch a new Asia-Pacific healthcare platform and China-focused life science venture.

The fund, dubbed CBC China Life Science Infrastructure Venture (CLSIV), completed a first close of $500 million to provide ‘best-in-class facilities’ for research in China. CBC describes it as the vehicle by which the platform, CBC Healthcare Infrastructure Platform (CBC HIP), will operate.

Chiquita Brooks-LaSure (Photo by Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

Although sales of Biogen’s expensive new Alzheimer’s drug have been anemic since the approval in June, the prospect of CMS eventually paying for it opens up a billion-dollar can of worms, and already has the agency defending some premium and deductible increases for seniors.

CMS explained late Friday that Medicare Part B will have to increase its standard monthly premium — from $148.50 in 2021 to $170.10 in 2022 — in part because of the massive spending that could occur should the agency sign off on a national coverage decision for the drug, known as Aduhelm, and its $56,000 annual price tag next year.

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Can injecting messenger RNA directly into the heart of patients who’ve experienced heart failure help repair the organ? More than three years after AstraZeneca and Moderna launched a first-of-its-kind Phase II trial to test the idea, the pair has now shown the procedure is at least safe.

In a Phase II trial dubbed EPICCURE, seven were treated with AZD8601 — mRNA-encoding vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF-A) — while four were given placebo. After six months of follow-up, investigators concluded the drug met the primary endpoints on safety and tolerability, while the exploratory efficacy analyses support further clinical evaluation.

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Uğur Şahin, BioNTech CEO (ddp images/Sipa USA/Sipa via AP Images)

For the first time since the pandemic began, BioNTech CEO Uğur Şahin made his way to the US, this time for a cancer drug conference in Washington, DC, last week. Prior to presenting his company’s poster on early, promising data for its CLDN6-targeted CAR-T, Şahin sat down with a small group of reporters and discussed his company’s blockbuster Covid-19 vaccine, and what’s to be expected from the pandemic moving forward.

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