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Week in Review: Long Hill Capital Closes $265 Million Fund for China Healthcare

publication date: Jul 28, 2018
 | 
author/source: Richard Daverman, PhD

Deals and Financings

Long Hill Capital of Beijing and Shanghai, which is focused on investments in the healthcare and consumer sectors, closed its second fund at $265 million (see story). The firm's first fund raised $125 million in 2016. Long Hill said the new fund "significantly exceeded” its original funding target, showing the success of its thesis-investing strategy. According to the firm, more than 80% of the investments so far have been in Series A rounds.  

Gossamer Bio of San Diego completed a $230 million Series B round led by Beijing-based Hillhouse Capital (see story). In January, Gossamer announced a $100 million initial capital raise. The company is developing immunology-based therapeutics for autoimmune, allergy/inflammation and immuno-oncology indications. The company has four products in development, three of them in clinical trials. It said it planned to use the capital for clinical trials of its early and late-stage candidates, along with more in-licensings.  

Japan's Terumo (TSE: 4543), a medical device company, has agreed to pay $130 million to acquire Essen Technology (Beijing), which makes drug eluting stents (see story). Terumo will also be responsible for a milestone payment, if sales goals are met. Terumo already sells interventional medical products in China, but the company does not market its own stents there. Essen reported revenues of $20 million per year.  

Beijing Allcure Medical completed a $103 million Series B round to support its standardized programs for China oncology imaging and radiation therapy treatment centers (see story). Allcure Medical offers comprehensive plans for radiology services to hospitals via its mdaccAutoPlan Radiotherapy Plan Algorithm, which includes everything from construction planning to standardized treatment plans and online consultation. China Capital Investment Group, a subsidiary of CICC, led the round. 

Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) formed a new collaboration with Beijing's Tsinghua University to develop drugs for novel targets associated with autoimmune disease and cancer (see story). The University's Innovation Center for Immune Therapy will do the research on the projects while BMS will have an option to license the candidates. In 2012, BMS collaborated with Tsinghua to discover targets and map their 3-D structural biology (see story). Now, the two entities are moving into drug development. BMS says the new collaboration shows its continued support of novel drug development in China. 

HitGen of Chengdu announced a drug discovery collaboration with Sanofi (NYSE: SNY) that will identify novel small molecule leads for targets of interest (see story). To discover lead molecules, HitGen will use its DNA-encoded library, which contains over 150 billion novel compounds. The candidates will be licensed exclusively to Sanofi. HitGen is a partnering powerhouse with over 50 companies already signed up to use its drug discovery services. In the Sanofi deal, HitGen will receive upfront payments and be eligible for milestones, though financial details were not disclosed.

Tencent (HK: 00700) partnered with WebMD, a US-based provider of health information, to offer reliable health information on Tencent's WeChat and QQ browser platforms (see story). Tencent will translate the WebMD information into Chinese and make the information specific to local conditions. The new China site(s) will offer a kind of branded information, meant to supplant current sources of healthcare information, which the company says can be inaccurate or misleading. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed. http://www.chinabiotoday.com/articles/Tencent-Partners-WebMD

Trials and Approvals

Merck/MSD (NYSE: MRK) announced that its PD-1 therapy, Keytruda®, was approved by the China National Drug Administration for second-line use in patients with metastatic melanoma (see story). It is the first approval of Keytruda in China and the second PD-1 drug to hit China's market. In early June, Opdivo from Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) was approved as a second-line treatment for NSCLC. Keytruda was approved in China under new accelerated approval rules based on a single-arm Phase Ib trial with an endpoint of overall response rate.

Beijing's BeiGene (NSDQ: BGNE) reported positive top-line results from a China pivotal Phase II trial of its PD-1 candidate in patients with classical Hodgkin's lymphoma (see story). The drug produced a 73% overall response and 50% complete response in patients with relapsed or refractory forms of the disease. BeiGene plans to use the results to support a China new drug application, which it expects to file later this year. One year ago, BeiGene out-licensed global rights (ex-Asia) for tislelizumab (BGB-A317) to Celgene (NSDQ: CELG)  in a record $1.4 billion deal that included $413 million in upfront payments.

Innovent Biologics (Suzhou) received CFDA approval to begin China clinical trials of two novel targeted antibody drugs: IBI101, an anti-OX40 agonistic antibody, and IBI307, an anti-RANKL antibody (see story). Innovent said OX40 is one of the most important targets in immuno-oncology, and the company's molecule is the first OX4 candidate granted China IND approval. The other candidate, IBI307, is aimed at osteoporosis and lytic bone lesions associated with cancer metastasis. There are no RANKL inhibitors approved for China use. Innovent is currently developing seventeen antibody drug candidates.

CBT Pharma, a US-China company, announced plans to begin an Australian Phase Ib trial of its PD-1 candidate (see story). CBT was founded by CRO CrownBio (TW: 6554), which has supplied CBT with three immuno-oncology candidates, including the PD-1 molecule, known as CBT-501. CBT's China partner, Genor Biopharma, is responsible for conducting the Australian trials. It plans to test CBT-501 in four separate types of advanced or relapsed/recurrent solid tumors, with each arm enrolling 20 patients.

Disclosure: none


 

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