| |   | Good morning, all. Damian here with an update to the biotech VC league table, some news from the world of murine science, and a promising sign for beleaguered biotech investors. | | | Orbimed tanks in the VC power rankings Orbimed, a biotech venture juggernaut that manages some $18 billion in assets, fell from first place to 14th in STAT’s latest annual ranking of VC performance.
As STAT’s Kate Sheridan reports, 2021 was much kinder to Alta Partners, Arch Venture Partners, and Flagship Pioneering, which rose multiple spots to become the top three best-performing venture firms of the year.
The performance data, which funds tend to closely guard, come from figures STAT obtained through public records requests of the institutions that put their money into VCs. You can get more granular details on more than a dozen of biotech’s biggest investment firms by downloading the full report here. | How much do you trust mice? That’s the question facing the FDA in the race to make subvariant-specific Covid-19 vaccines available before the winter, a prospect that would mean clearing new shots without the benefit of human clinical trials.
As STAT's Matthew Herper reports, partners Pfizer and BioNTech said yesterday they completed an emergency-use application for a bivalent mRNA vaccine that encodes for the dominant BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of Omicron in addition to the original strain. That application includes human data from an earlier, BA.1-directed vaccine and “pre-clinical and manufacturing data” on the new one — meaning evidence from mouse studies.
The FDA has already signaled its willingness to authorize new Covid-19 vaccines based on how well they work for mice, but the idea has divided the agency’s independent advisers, who question the reliability of animal studies and the practicality of trying to persuade people to take a vaccine that hasn’t been through a human trial.
Read more. | This fall, join STAT live in DC Learn from the researchers, patient advocates, and lawmakers driving the next breakthroughs in rare disease research this September 15. Stay once the conversation is complete for a networking and cocktail hour. Purchase your ticket now (or unlock a free pass as a STAT+ subscriber). | A beacon of hope in the quest to decode ALS A curious thing happens when you inject rodents with cerebrospinal fluid of patients with ALS: The mice start to show signs of the neurodegenerative disease. Building on that observation, a team of researchers have found promising clues as to how the disease sets in — and, potentially, how it might be treated.
As STAT’s Isabella Cueto reports, scientists at the Tisch MS Research Center of New York ran their experiment time and again, confirming that the implanted spinal fluid was to blame for the apparent murine ALS. Through a painstaking process of elimination, they found a potential molecular culprit: apolipoprotein B-100, or ApoB-100.
There’s loads more work to do before anyone can claim ApoB-100 is the root cause of ALS, but the early research lights a path to better understanding a disease that has evaded drug developers for decades.
Read more. | Bidding wars can still happen in biotech Behind the scenes of Pfizer’s $5.4 billion acquisition of Global Blood Therapeutics was a two-month bidding war between three suitors that drove the final asking price up by nearly 25%, a heartening sign for biotech investors hoping the industry’s biggest companies are willing to pay a premium for promising companies.
As Global Blood explained in a requisite filing with the SEC, it all started on May 26, when a representative of an unnamed pharmaceutical company reached out to CEO Ted Love, leading to a June 6 meeting at which that company made a non-binding proposal to buy Global Blood for $55 a share. On June 15, at the direction of Global Blood’s board, the company’s financial advisers called up Pfizer to see if it was interested in a rival bid. A day later, those same advisers called a second unnamed pharma company with a similar question. After multiple rounds of rejections, renegotiations, and retrenchments, Global Blood signed a deal Aug. 7 to sell itself to Pfizer for $68.50 per share.
We may never learn the identities of the two spurned bidders (people on Twitter have suggested Sanofi, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, or Bristol Myers Squibb), but the simple fact of their interest is good news for a biotech sector in the midst of a fits-and-starts recovery. It was only months ago that small drugmakers were selling themselves at prices below their 2021 heights. | More reads - Anthony Fauci to step down as nation’s top infectious disease official. STAT
- CDC recommends use of Novavax's Covid-19 shot for adolescents. Reuters
- Zapping the brain with electricity shown to boost older people’s short- and long-term memory. STAT
- Meet the secretive biotech hedge fund whose elite clients include the Tisch family, Yale's endowment. CNBC
| Thanks for reading! Until tomorrow,  | | | |
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