Josh Resnick

Oct 22, 2020

Max Gelman Associate Editor Just over 15 months af­ter launch­ing its first ven­ture fund, RA Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment is ready for more. And this time the firm is bring­ing an even big­ger load of cash to the ta­ble. An­nounc­ing the close of its Nexus II fund on Wednes­day, RA said it raised $461 mil­lion for in­vest­ments in pri­vate com­pa­nies across the biotech in­dus­try. The first ven­ture fund, which raised $300 mil­lion, has churned through rough­ly 80% of its cap­i­tal al­ready, a pace that man­ag­ing part­ner Raj Shah called un­usu­al­ly quick. “Ob­vi­ous­ly there were some op­por­tu­ni­ties that oc­curred be­cause of Covid-19, and then there were just many across a va­ri­ety of ther­a­peu­tic ar­eas that ul­ti­mate­ly were com­pelling to us,” Shah told End­points News. “Based on our deal flow and what we saw, we end­ed up in­vest­ing at a pace that was more rapid than I think is typ­i­cal and than what we had in­tend­ed orig­i­nal­ly.” The new fund will large­ly build off the first, and though the cash pool is still sep­a­rate from RA’s main fund, the fo­cus will re­main in the life sci­ences are­na, Shah said. Nexus I saw in­vest­ment across 18 dis­tinct ar­eas and fund­ed 59 com­pa­nies, 15 of which have gone pub­lic or have been ac­quired. RA’s main fund in­vests not on­ly in pri­vate com­pa­nies but al­so par­tic­i­pates in fol­low-on in­vest­ments as well as new­ly-pub­lic com­pa­nies, Shah said. Shah doesn’t ex­pect the Nexus II mon­ey to be in­vest­ed at a sim­i­lar­ly quick pace, though he did say the plan is for Nexus II to be a 10-year fund. That way, RA can stay flex­i­ble with what­ev­er in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties might come about. Josh Resnick Orig­i­nal­ly found­ed by Shah and Pe­ter Kolchin­sky, RA has built up a team of more than 90 sci­en­tists and re­searchers over the years who pore over all the da­ta and cat­a­log emerg­ing trends, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Josh Resnick said. Every life sci­ences VC has its own ap­proach to in­vest­ing, but the size of that di­vi­sion — called TechAt­las — is fair­ly atyp­i­cal with­in the in­dus­try and al­lows the firm to keep up with all the in­no­va­tion that’s go­ing on in the field right now. “That gives us a ready source of sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly map­ping and cat­e­go­riz­ing it,” Resnick said. “What that al­lows us to do re­al­ly is put any in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ty quick­ly in­to its con­text so that, rather than rush­ing to try to un­der­stand some­thing from first prin­ci­ples, we are ready to re­act to most op­por­tu­ni­ties, frankly, be­cause we know where they fit in­to the mar­ket and in­to a com­pet­i­tive space.” At the end of the day, it’s still most­ly about the mon­ey. RA nar­rows their choic­es down to the tech­nolo­gies and R&D that it feels can be the most “dis­rup­tive,” Shah said, with the po­ten­tial of be­com­ing the stan­dard of care with­in five to 10 years. Though RA isn’t di­vulging specifics about what it’s look­ing at right now, Resnick added they nev­er say no out­right to any­thing. “We’re lucky enough to have the ca­pa­bil­i­ties to be some­what abreast of pret­ty much every ther­a­peu­tic area and so re­spond to things on their mer­its,” Resnick said. “Ob­vi­ous­ly there will be some that are more in­vestable than oth­ers, but there’s no area that’s closed off and there’s no area where we say, ‘We’re go­ing to do X amount in this year.’” AUTHOR John Carroll Editor & Founder Biogen has flagged a pair of setbacks in the pipeline, spotlighting the final failure for a one-time top MS prospect while scrapping a gene therapy for SMA after the IND was put on hold due to toxicity. Both failures will raise the stakes even higher on aducanumab, the Alzheimer’s drug that Biogen is betting the ranch on, determined to pursue an FDA OK despite significant skepticism they can make it with mixed results and a reliance on post hoc data mining. And the failures are being reported as Biogen was forced to cut its profit forecast for 2020 as a generic rival started to erode their big franchise drug. Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription Unlock this story instantly and join 92,200+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free. SUBSCRIBE John Carroll Editor & Founder After a 7-year stretch building the commercial team at Sarepta, longtime drug salesman Bo Cumbo is jumping to the entrepreneurial side of the business, taking the helm of a startup that’s got several deep-pocket investors. And he’s not just bringing his experience in selling drugs. He tells me that when he told Sarepta CEO Doug Ingram about it, his boss got excited about the venture and opted to jump in with a $15 million investment from Sarepta to add to the launch money, alongside 3 of the busiest investors in biotech. Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription Unlock this story instantly and join 92,200+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free. SUBSCRIBE John Carroll Editor & Founder Setting the stage for an extraordinary one-day meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee this Thursday, the FDA has cleared 2 experts of financial conflicts to help beef up the committee. And regulators went on to specify the safety, efficacy and CMC input they’re looking for on EUAs, before they move on to the full BLA approval process. All of this has already been spelled out to the developers. But the devil is in the details, and it’s clear from the first round of posted responses that some of the top players — including J&J and Pfizer — would like some adjustments and added feedback. And on Thursday, the experts can offer their own thoughts on shaping the first OKs. Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription Unlock this story instantly and join 92,200+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free. SUBSCRIBE John Carroll Editor & Founder It’s only right that one of the industry’s top dealmakers just completed one of the biggest SPAC-related deals in the pipeline. David Hung, of Medivation fame, has completed a back flip into the market, merging with EcoR1 Capital’s SPAC Panacea and landing neatly on Wall Street with an $NUVB stock ticker after filling out the blank check in his name. In addition to the $144 million held in the SPAC — provided none of the investors opt out — Hung is getting ahold of $500 million more being chipped in by a slate of institutional investors who feel that Hung could have the keys to another Medivation-style success. Keep reading Endpoints with a free subscription Unlock this story instantly and join 92,200+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it's free. SUBSCRIBE John Carroll Editor & Founder From the beginning, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla eschewed government funding for his Covid-19 vaccine work with BioNTech, willing to take all the $2 billion-plus risk of a lightning-fast development campaign in exchange for all the rewards that could fall its way with success. And now that the pharma giant has seized a solid lead in the race to the market, those rewards loom large. SVB Leerink’s Geoff Porges has been running the numbers on Pfizer’s vaccine, the mRNA BNT162b2 program that the German biotech partnered on. And he sees a $3.5 billion peak in windfall revenue next year alone. Even after the pandemic is brought to heel, though, Porges sees a continuing blockbuster role for this vaccine as people around the world look to guard against a new, thoroughly endemic virus that will pose a permanent threat. 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