Joel Dud­ley re­cent­ly joined the team at the in­vest­ment firm In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors, start­ed by for­mer Google CEO Er­ic Schmidt, in Au­gust with a mis­sion to in­vest deeply in the biotech world. And now, sev­er­al weeks af­ter bring­ing him on, the firm has made its lat­est such in­vest­ment and the first with Dud­ley on board.

In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors has led an $8 mil­lion seed round in Har­mon­ic Dis­cov­ery, the firm an­nounced Thurs­day morn­ing. Dud­ley will al­so join the com­pa­ny’s board.

In an in­ter­view with End­points News, Har­mon­ic Dis­cov­ery CEO Ray­ees Rah­man said that Dud­ley con­nect­ed with the com­pa­ny just af­ter its found­ing in 2021, hav­ing met through a mu­tu­al con­tact. Dud­ley was al­so a part of Rah­man’s PhD com­mit­tee, so he be­gan men­tor­ing the com­pa­ny around that time.

Rah­man said that Har­mon­ic Dis­cov­ery is build­ing a plat­form to de­sign small mol­e­cule drugs that can tar­get mul­ti­ple pro­teins at the same time, through build­ing a ki­nase dis­cov­ery plat­form and uti­liz­ing ma­chine learn­ing to help with the process.

“A lot of mod­ern drug dis­cov­ery is re­al­ly fo­cused on find­ing sin­gle tar­gets, sin­gle pro­teins that are mu­tat­ed or dys­reg­u­lat­ed that cause dis­ease, when in re­al­i­ty, most times dis­eases are caused by a con­stel­la­tion of dif­fer­ent pro­teins…and there’s not a lot of com­pu­ta­tion­al plat­forms that en­able this type of drug dis­cov­ery,” Rah­man said to End­points.

The ini­tial funds will go to­ward three ma­jor ar­eas: build­ing out the lead­er­ship team, ex­pand­ing its lab­o­ra­to­ry ca­pac­i­ty in Tuc­son, AZ, and fund­ing drug dis­cov­ery ef­forts through aug­ment­ing its chem­i­cal li­braries.

Rah­man al­so said that while more fund­ing through a Se­ries A is not out of the cards, it may take a few years be­fore Har­mon­ic Dis­cov­ery takes the plunge. Rah­man said by the time the Se­ries A process starts, he wants to grow the team from eight to 10 em­ploy­ees. And while the com­pa­ny al­so hasn’t ze­roed in on a lead can­di­date just yet, he hopes to have some­thing in the pipeline be­fore a Se­ries A.

As for what sets biotech apart from the ever-grow­ing num­ber of biotechs us­ing ma­chine learn­ing, Rah­man said that the com­pa­ny has strong fun­da­men­tals in bi­ol­o­gy.

“We’re re­al­ly deeply knowl­edge­able about pro­tein ki­nas­es, their struc­tur­al bi­ol­o­gy and ma­chine learn­ing in­volved to train mod­els and un­der­stand pro­tein ki­nas­es. So, we’re very fo­cused on solv­ing this one spe­cif­ic prob­lem,” Rah­man said.

Rah­man al­so states that they are not treat­ing the ma­chine learn­ing as­pect as a one-size-fits-all mod­el and are tak­ing a broad­er ap­proach to dis­cov­ery.

Oth­er in­vestors in the round in­clude Fifty Years, Y Com­bi­na­tor, Boom Cap­i­tal and Caf­feinat­ed Cap­i­tal, along with oth­er an­gel in­vestors.

As for Dud­ley, a for­mer CSO at a biotech start­up and a mem­ber of the team that in­ves­ti­gat­ed Ther­a­nos’ blood tests, he had pre­vi­ous­ly told End­points that he is bull­ish on re­cent de­vel­op­ments in the biotech world and was ea­ger for In­no­va­tion En­deav­ors to be more in­volved. He has been tasked with bring­ing the com­pa­ny clos­er to the biotech world.

PARIS — A little more than four years after Bristol Myers Squibb proudly unveiled a $3.6 billion, next-gen I/O alliance with Nektar, including about half of that in cold, hard cash, investigators have turned up at ESMO with the full set of disastrous Phase III data that helped ice the whole deal.

We learned back in March that Opdivo plus Nektar’s IL-2 therapy bempeg flunked a Phase III melanoma study. Now we’re learning that the combo actually performed significantly worse than Opdivo alone, while raising added safety threats for the patients in the combo arm.

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PARIS — Amgen came to Paris with a two-step plan to reveal confirmatory CodeBreak 200 trial data for its KRAS G12C drug Lumakras in non-small cell lung cancer. After tipping its cards ahead of the conference to stake a top-line claim — sans data — on hitting the primary endpoint for median progression-free survival over docetaxel at 12 months, we’re getting the initial snapshot that details just how the comparison stacks up.

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Over in the public market, we’re watching the wheat being remorselessly separated from the chaff as the biotech sector went from everyone’s darling to the orphan child of Wall Street. That was inevitable. But while there’s been a knock-on effect in the venture investing side, we’re seeing clear evidence that big players are sticking with their game plan: Major technological breakthroughs are opening doors to biotech startups that didn’t exist five years ago — and the sophisticated investors don’t want to miss out.

Bristol Myers Squibb made a megablockbuster bet on deucravacitinib, the experimental TYK2 drug the company landed in the Celgene buyout, keeping it while auctioning off the rival Otezla to Amgen for $13.4 billion.

Friday evening, that bet paid off in a landmark win, with Bristol Myers getting a green light to sell the first-in-class oral psoriasis drug — as Sotyktu (get it?) — for $75,000 a year as analysts project peak sales in the $3 billion-plus range. And there’s a big bonus: The cheering section of the analysts on duty here breathed a sigh of relief that the FDA didn’t slap it with a black box warning for its relation to the JAK family — where strict safety warnings are prominent.

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Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.

Trying to keep up with all the news coming out of ESMO? Well, other than the special event section below, we’ll also be updating the website throughout the weekend. If you prefer a summary, join Arsalan Arif and John Carroll for a virtual recap and analysis on Monday, when we will also publish a special report.

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Alnylam has detailed positive APOLLO-B data for its pivotal trial of patisiran in treating transthyretin-mediated — or ATTR — amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy. And the results spell out a clear advantage over a placebo in preventing a rapid decline in a 6-minute walk test.

But bound to get immediate attention are unanswered questions on the drug’s health benefits and how the drug and placebo data tracked in the study for an increasingly common heart ailment compared to the disaster that befell a rival therapy at BridgeBio. On that score, there was a wild difference between the two studies in the placebo arm, where patients typically see swift deterioration.

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PARIS — Last fall Deciphera suffered through a disastrous setback $DCPH with its lead drug, Qinlock, which had been approved as a fourth-line therapy for gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) but then failed in an attempt to move upstream in the treatment scenario — essentially relegating it to minor sales revenue instead of the blockbuster potential some analysts had painted.

That knockdown, which sent its stock into a tailspin the biotech has not recovered from, forced the Deciphera team to undergo a thorough reassessment of the pipeline, and a move to cull its work and focus on the clinical program for vimseltinib, a CSF1R inhibitor being studied as a therapy for tenoysynovial giant cell tumor — or TGCT.

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PARIS — During a Sunday morning ESMO presentation session on non-small cell lung cancer in which the overflow section overflowed, AstraZeneca took the first two presentations, giving an update on two drugs. First came Enhertu, its HER2-targeted antibody drug conjugate, which posted similar results to those that won it an accelerated approval in a tiny subgroup of NSCLC patients in August.

Second, AstraZeneca presented on one of its early-stage prospects, MEDI5752. A relic of the MedImmune name which the pharma retired in 2019, MEDI5752 is a bispecific that targets two well-known immune checkpoints: CTLA-4 and PD-1.

Unlike in other neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, the pathology of Parkinson’s is relatively well-understood. Researchers have known for decades that the disease affects the brain’s production of dopamine, whereas Alzheimer’s has flummoxed those investigating amyloid and other once-promising theories.

But the broader depth of knowledge has still yet to translate into newer, more effective therapies. After the FDA approved Sinemet in the 1970s, a combination of two drugs designed to convert into dopamine in the brain (and maintain that conversion), the product remains patients’ primary therapy.

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Bioscience & Technology Business Center The University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas

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