Bruce Booth
12.1K posts
@LifeSciVC
Early stage biotech VC. Recovering scientist. Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of Atlas Venture.
for a while i've had a slight fear that the bluetooth from my airpods could be frying my brain this weekend i pulled the raw data from a $30m government study of 1,679 mice blasted with cell phone radiation and reanalyzed it what i found was...not what I expected? 🧵
With the approval of tovorafenib by $DAWN, it’s worth celebrating the long journey of R&D in our business. Others have written on this better (@JacobPlieth @SFBIZronleuty), but here’s the short story: The molecule was discovered in a collaboration between Sunesis & Biogen that started 20 years ago. Biogen deprioritized oncology under CEO Scangos and stopped working on RAF in 2010, reverting rights back to Sunesis. But tovo was covered by key patents from the collaboration, which were assigned to Sunesis. Fwiw, two of the co-inventors of tovo later became Atlas entrepreneurs: Gnanasambandam Kumar Kumaravel (Padlock) and Alexey Lugovsky (Diagonal). Small world of both the Biogen diaspora and the @atlasventure network. Takeda licensed it from Sunesis in 2011, and over next 6-7 years its clinical work in melanoma failed to deliver. Physician-scientist/pediatric oncologist @drsam co-founded Day One with @JuliePapanek in 2019 to focus on pediatric cancer. They license tovo from Takeda in 2020, and my partner @MikeNGladstone convinced Atlas to join Canaan Partners in the $60M Series A, as did Access Industries. Company goes public in a 2021 IPO. Sunesis retained some economics in tovo. It did a reverse merger in 2021, and became Viracta. It sold its tovo milestones/royalties to Xoma later that year. After the success of Firefly-1 in pediatric LGG, tovo (Ojemda) was granted accelerated approval, with the ongoing Phase 3 Firefly-2 study underway. Amazing journey, with many teams participating along the way. It takes a village... or at least a collaborative ecosystem... to bring drugs to patients.
With the approval of tovorafenib by $DAWN, it’s worth celebrating the long journey of R&D in our business. Others have written on this better (@JacobPlieth @SFBIZronleuty), but here’s the short story: The molecule was discovered in a collaboration between Sunesis & Biogen that started 20 years ago. Biogen deprioritized oncology under CEO Scangos and stopped working on RAF in 2010, reverting rights back to Sunesis. But tovo was covered by key patents from the collaboration, which were assigned to Sunesis. Fwiw, two of the co-inventors of tovo later became Atlas entrepreneurs: Gnanasambandam Kumar Kumaravel (Padlock) and Alexey Lugovsky (Diagonal). Small world of both the Biogen diaspora and the @atlasventure network. Takeda licensed it from Sunesis in 2011, and over next 6-7 years its clinical work in melanoma failed to deliver. Physician-scientist/pediatric oncologist @drsam co-founded Day One with @JuliePapanek in 2019 to focus on pediatric cancer. They license tovo from Takeda in 2020, and my partner @MikeNGladstone convinced Atlas to join Canaan Partners in the $60M Series A, as did Access Industries. Company goes public in a 2021 IPO. Sunesis retained some economics in tovo. It did a reverse merger in 2021, and became Viracta. It sold its tovo milestones/royalties to Xoma later that year. After the success of Firefly-1 in pediatric LGG, tovo (Ojemda) was granted accelerated approval, with the ongoing Phase 3 Firefly-2 study underway. Amazing journey, with many teams participating along the way. It takes a village... or at least a collaborative ecosystem... to bring drugs to patients.
Sad day in NL, the Dutch government is expected to pass a bill introducing a 36% tax on unrealized capital gains. This will destroy long-term strategies, kill compounding effects & trigger a wealth exodus of biblical proportions. But they'll pass it anyway. Can't fix stupid.
𝐁𝐢𝐨𝐕𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐕𝐨𝐢𝐂𝐞𝐬: @generalatlantic's Brett Zbar describes investing through the lens of private equity, and touches on key technology themes that interest him. Full video: biotechtv.com/post/bioventur…
