Vivo Capital, Bain, Primavera pour $200M into virtually unknown targeted oncology play out of China

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.’
https://endpts.com/vivo-capital-bain-primavera-pour-200m-into-virtually-unknown-targeted-oncology-play-out-of-china/