Brent Saunders joins $100M Series C for a company out to be the BridgeBio of aging – Endpoints News

David Nichol­son Al­ler­gan

A few yr in the past, James Pey­er, a CEO and co-founder of the lit­tle identified longevi­ty biotech Cam­bri­an, was strive­ing to search out some R&D tal­ent final yr when he met with greater than a little bit of ex­pe­ri­ence in that de­half­ment: David Nichol­son, the for­mer R&D chief of the erst­whereas phar­ma gi­ant Al­ler­gan.

It turned out Nichol­son al­prepared had an in­ter­est in Pey­er’s area. Of their Al­ler­gan days, he and COO Brent Saun­ders held week­ly mee­tups the place they tried to fig­ure out take the com­pa­ny’s dom­i­nance in aes­thet­ics — which, un­til re­cent­ly, was of­ten what peo­ple meant by an­ti-ag­ing sci­ence — and ex­per­tise with extra tra­di­tion­al drug de­vel­op­ment, and use it to make medicine that ex­have a tendency peo­ple’s lifes­pan.

Brent Saun­ders

A $63 bil­lion of­fer from Ab­b­Vie fast­ly put an finish to these plans, however nei­ther’s in­ter­est ever finish­ed. And af­ter Nichol­son in­tro­duced the 2, Saun­ders is be a part of­ing Cam­bri­an’s board — and chip­ping in a small por­tion of a $100 mil­lion Se­ries C.

“We simply form of hit it off. And he had all of this nice advert­vice and ideas on how this longevi­ty area was go­ing to in­ter­act with the best way that huge phar­ma and biotech ecosys­tem was,” mentioned Pey­er. “So, he’s placing his mon­ey the place his mouth is. And he re­al­ly un­der­stands that mod­el.”

That mod­el is what Pey­er thinks will elevate Cam­bri­an previous the strug­gling longevi­ty biotechs which have come be­fore it, or the oth­er new longevi­ty biotechs strug­gling to realize a toe-hold in a crowd­ed mar­ket and in a area that also at­tracts as many skep­tics as professional­po­nents.

Es­sen­tial­ly, Cam­bri­an desires to be the Roivant or Bridge Bio­phar­ma for longevi­ty. By se­lect­ing as­units from uni­ver­si­ty labs — and uni­ver­si­ty spin­outs that sput­tered on launch — the com­pa­ny has col­lect­ed 14 dif­fer­ent professional­grams that tack­le dif­fer­ent caus­es or po­ten­tial ag­ing: Cel­lu­lar dys­func­tion, for ex­am­ple, or tis­sue re­gen­er­a­tion.

The biotech will first ap­ply every in a par­tic­u­lar age-re­lat­ed dis­or­der or dis­or­ders, with the concept that in the future, if it proves ef­fec­tive, it may check the ther­a­py down the highway for what Pey­er and oth­ers within the area name “gero­professional­tec­tion.”

“Each one of many professional­grams is smart as its personal in­di­vid­ual biotech com­pa­ny,” Pey­er mentioned.

He not­ed, for ex­am­ple, Vi­ta, a biotech Cam­bri­an par­tial­ly spun out final yr to de­vel­op cell ther­a­pies to re­retailer mus­cle in pa­tients with mus­cu­lar dy­s­tro­phies.

“Vi­ta as a neu­ro­mus­cu­lar dis­ease cell ther­a­py com­pa­ny makes nice sense,” he mentioned. “And the truth that tech­nol­o­gy may even­tu­al­ly be used to deal with peo­ple with de­vel­op­ing sar­cope­nia [mus­cle loss] of their previous age, that’s like a cher­ry on high of an al­prepared good biotech.”

That mod­el al­so in­shaped the com­pa­ny’s alternative in in­vestors, Pey­er mentioned. Large biotech VC funds view huge port­fo­lio com­pa­nies like Ro­viant and Bridge Bio extra as com­peti­tors than in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties, he mentioned.

So like these companies — which massive­ly raised their ear­ly cap­i­tal from Wall Avenue — he turned else­the place.

The deep tech fund An­thos Cap­i­tal and the hedge fund SALT Fund co-led the Se­ries C, joined by Ape­iron In­vest­ment Group — whose founder Chris­t­ian Anger­could­er co-found­ed Cam­bri­an — Fu­ture Ven­tures and Moore Cap­i­tal.

Cam­bri­an now has 115 em­ploy­ees and 14 professional­grams, with a plan to push its first professional­grams within the clin­ic on the be­gin­ning of 2023.

These shall be in par­tic­u­lar, dis­crete dis­eases, however Pey­er mentioned the com­pa­ny is al­prepared strive­ing to fig­ure out how they may in the future run a big tri­al to check a drug’s gen­er­al an­ti-ag­ing abil­i­ty. Lengthy a co­nun­drum for the longevi­ty area, these tri­als will like­ly re­quire re­searchers to de­vel­op a bio­mark­er or oth­er sur­ro­gate finish­level for ag­ing, for the sim­ple rea­son that sim­ply wait­ing for sufficient previous­er wholesome peo­ple to die can take fairly some time.

That re­quires in­vest­ments that the majority VC-backed biotechs don’t have the funds or lat­i­tude to make.

“However with this fund­ing, we’re ac­tu­al­ly capable of begin construct­ing the in­fra­struc­ture to­day to — as we ship our professional­grams to the clin­ic — mea­positive any­factor and each­factor on the bio­mark­er facet,” he mentioned. “And begin placing to­geth­er what we expect would be the de­fin­i­tive dataset to ap­proach the FDA and say, hey, look, we wish to run these bio­mark­er-en­abled clin­i­cal tri­als in a pre­ven­ta­tive set­ting. What do you suppose?”