Around the same time serial entrepreneur Gary Glick was putting together his latest (and biggest yet) venture, Odyssey Therapeutics this past March, a mentee introduced him to a young London-based company working on applying machine learning to drug discovery.
Rahko, founded just three years ago by a few machine learning experts, was developing a platform right up Glick’s alley: Odyssey, as he’s conceived it, would execute on drug discovery at top speed just like IFM and Scorpion, his previous startups, but do it with a heavy dose of data science.
The initial idea was to team up and leverage Rahko’s molecular simulation and machine learning capabilities to design compounds for Odyssey.
But it turned into something much deeper.
Odyssey, flush with $218 million in venture dollars, revealed Thursday morning that it will acquire Rahko, integrating its 13 staffers into a 100-plus team — while adding more people to the team, which will remain in London. With some of the ‘leading minds’ in the area of generative modeling, Glick noted that Rahko could turbocharge Odyssey’s R&D efforts in one of two ways: approaching targets it otherwise couldn’t, and also coming up with better molecules than it otherwise could create.
‘If you don’t have a hit, there’s no program,’ Glick said. ‘That’s a big bottleneck. And that’s not insignificant. There are many, many examples in pharma where people run high throughput screens for a target of interest that just don’t get anything.’
As for what those R&D efforts are about exactly, Odyssey is remaining secretive, divulging only that it’s working on inflammation and oncology — and building on ‘past approaches’ of anti-TNF antibodies, JAK inhibitors and targeted cancer immunotherapies.
Glick much preferred talking about how Odyssey’s internal processes set it apart from traditional drugmakers — which he believes has been crucial to recruiting people like Heather Carlson, an expert in computational drug discovery who’s leaving the University of Michigan to join the biotech.
Typically, in the industry, computational chemistry is seen as a support service. And so, some program or groups of programs may send structures to a computational chemist, and they’ll say, just tell me the best one. And, you know, they do what they do, and they ship them back. And a lot of them find that kind of unrewarding […] What we have done differently, certainly to many large pharma, is that you know, whether you’re a synthetic organic chemist that’s been practicing medicinal chemistry, or whether you’re a computational chemist, or a data scientist that’s been practicing drug hunting, they are both part of a team, they both get to design compounds, those compounds are made. Project teams are resourced with appropriate — appropriately sized with chemistry resources that all the compounds can be made. That’s how you get the best decisions.
Their Staying Power Lies in their Patient-Centricity
Decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) were traditionally utilized in an isolated fashion prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. To continue their research within the constraints of the pandemic, sponsors and clinical investigators pivoted to a decentralized model out of necessity. At the onset, regulatory agencies offered some guidance on the digital approaches that are acceptable to ensure DCT approaches are applied in a way that maintains patient safety, as well as data quality and integrity.
Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, has become one of Silicon Valley’s biggest advocates for new forms of funding and conducting science (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED)
It’s big days for biology.
The pandemic has seen a series of very public scientific breakthroughs: mRNA vaccine, Covid antibodies, CRISPR as therapy. The minds behind these advancements have graced magazine covers and received prestigious awards.
But the last two years have also, far more quietly, seen a series of new experiments in how to fund the next generation of scientific breakthroughs.
Since March 2020, investors, academics, a significant number of Silicon Valley types, at least one Russian billionaire and two crypto billionaires and, most recently, a few West Coast universities have launched a series of grant programs, institutes, NGOs and companies hoping to change how life science research is done. Though unaffiliated and varying greatly in both size and form, they have broadly promised to evade bureaucracy and misaligned incentives and advance both basic and not-so-basic research in ways they say can’t be done in either conventional academia or profit-focused biotech.
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Robert Bradway, Amgen president and CEO (Getty)
Amgen is approaching the new year the same way it tackled 2021: swinging deals. But now it’s aiming to bring AI capabilities into the fold.
The big biopharma is partnering with Flagship’s Generate Biosciences on five therapeutic programs, the companies announced Thursday morning, in a collaboration that seeks to pair Generate’s machine learning algorithms with Amgen’s drug development capabilities. Amgen will pay $50 million upfront and up to $370 million in milestones for each program, which could total $1.9 billion when all is said and done.
Eli Lilly is beefing up its fleet of vehicles being deployed to carry drugs to the brain.
Enlisting Canada’s Entos Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly has grabbed rights to a suite of proteo-lipid vehicles (PLVs) as part of a research collaboration that spans multiple programs focused on diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system. Entos will receive an upfront of $50 million, part of it as an equity investment, to start developing PLVs for Lilly’s selection.
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Chris Perkin, Altasciences via Youtube
Altasciences CEO Chris Perkin has gone through several acquisitions in his 45-year career. And if there’s one thing he learned, it’s how not to go through an acquisition.
His company put that knowledge to use on Tuesday when it announced that it had acquired competitor Sinclair research, a preclinical contract research organization in Missouri. With the pickup, Altasciences gains 80 animal rooms, and full-service IND and NDA-enabling toxicology and safety pharmacology services.
For anyone who’s been following how the US government has been allocating and shipping supplies of its Covid-19 treatments over the past year, the news has shifted so many times that it can be difficult to keep track of what’s still being shipped and where.
More change is coming this week too, as HHS has now decided to re-start shipments of both Eli Lilly (bamlanivimab plus etesevimab) and Regeneron (casirivimab plus imdevimab) monoclonal antibody products after a short pause because neither product works against the new variant Omicron. Lilly’s combo also was halted last June due to the presence of other variants.
Kicking off 2022, hundreds of pharmaceuticals, including some blockbusters, saw their list prices rise by about 5% on average. But overall, net drug prices (cost after rebates) declined for the fourth year in a row, potentially complicating already stalled drug price reform efforts.
Among the drugs seeing new increases as of Jan. 1 are Gilead’s bevy of blockbuster HIV drugs.
Biktarvy, which pulled in more than $7 billion in worldwide sales in 2020, saw a 4.8% price increase in 2021, and now, another 5.6% increase in 2022, according to a new report from the nonprofit 46brooklyn Research.
John Maraganore (Scott Eisen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On his way out of Alnylam, outgoing CEO John Maraganore, who had led the biotech through thick and thin for 19 years, said late last year he wanted to advise new biotech companies in the grandfather phase of his career.
‘It’s like a grandfather, right? You get the benefit of loving your grandchildren, but not having to take care of them all the time,’ Maraganore said at the time. ‘I want to be a granddad.’
Roger Perlmutter, Eikon CEO
Roger Perlmutter hasn’t wasted any time since announcing his supposed retirement from Merck in October 2020. After leaving his perch as one of the most successful R&D chiefs in Big Pharma, he’s now snatching a cool half-billion dollars to develop ‘a battery of innovative tools’ for drug discovery at the young startup Eikon Therapeutics.
Eikon closed on a $517.8 million Series B round on Thursday morning, bringing the Hayward, CA-based company’s total raise to more than $668 million.
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