Avid Bioservices Inc (CDMO)

[biopharm]

It would be nice if John Springs Stafford just came clean

The IP behind PS Targeting seems right up Tracy Saxton and Vincent Cheung alleys but Tracy only is listed under Pivotal Bioventure Partners from Jan 2017 till December 2017 so wonder what circumstances were playing out there and as for Stafford, I am sure email chains that web crawl from Biotech to bioteh to MD to researchers to hedge funds may be enough to force Stafford to talk because there is no way Stafford shows up to steer IP PS Targeting away from Dr Wolchok etc for no reason

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With single Chinese investor, $300 million venture fund targets drug startups

Tracy Saxton, formerly an investor with Roche Venture Fund and SV Life Sciences and the industry alliances manager at UC's QB3 institute, is the founder and managing partner of Pivotal BioVenture Partners.

Ron Leuty, Reporter
Mar 16, 2017, 5:00am PDT
A new venture capital firm backed by a single Chinese investor is targeting early-stage drug companies with its inaugural $300 million fund.

Pivotal BioVenture Partners of San Francisco, led by a Roche Venture Fund veteran, is the latest in a string of life sciences VCs pulling in big money to invest in a range of drug, device and diagnostic companies. But unlike most funds, Pivotal is taking a longer, tougher road with its plan to invest $15 million-$20 million in 15-18 companies that haven't yet demonstrated proof of concept for their dream drugs.

"We're going back to basics — where are the advances, the fundamental needs — and doubling down on those types of opportunities," said Tracy Saxton, Pivotal's founder and managing partner.

Pivotal will do that with the backing of Nan Fung Group, originally a Hong Kong textile company whose investments have focused on real estate, hotels and shipping. Only in the past year or so has Nan Fung zeroed in on the life sciences, including as a limited partner in other venture funds; Pivotal, Saxton said, essentially becomes Nan Fung's U.S. and European therapeutics fund.

Nan Fung COO Vincent Cheung — the grandson of late company founder Chen Din Hwa and a former biochemistry student at the University of California, Berkeley — is Pivotal's managing partner.

The single-investor structure for a large venture fund is atypical. Funds, especially first-time funds by new VCs, often collect a handful of limited partners as investors, including pension funds, insurance companies and Big Pharma companies. Such a structure helps spread the investment risk.

But Saxton met Cheung this past summer, found a mutual interest in early-stage, innovative therapeutics and initiated talks about starting a fund, Saxton said. The deal closed in early January.

"Early stage" and "innovative" are two key terms for Pivotal. The fund, expecting to announce its first investment in a preclinical company yet this month, won't chase investments in cancer immunotherapy, the CRISPR gene-editing platform or other white-hot areas of commercial and academic interest. Instead, Saxton said, Pivotal may be interested in drugs that could play off broader advances in immunology brought about by cancer immunotherapy.

Saxton personally has an interest in immunology, infectious diseases, cancer and so-called orphan, or rare, diseases.

"We're fairly agnostic" as far as the types of disease targets, she said.

Yet Pivotal's focus always will be on early-stage companies that haven't yet reached human clinical trials or whose concepts haven't yet been borne out in those studies.

That investment philosophy would put it in the same strategic realm as some of the most well-respected biotech VCs, including Third Rock Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners and former Genentech research boss Dave Goeddel's The Column Group. Those three firms have offices within a few blocks of Pivotal's home at 1700 Owens St. in Mission Bay.

Most VC money, Saxton said, is flowing toward later-stage companies that have data from Phase II or Phase III studies, which place those companies relatively close to a Food and Drug Administration drug approval decision.

While early-stage companies are getting cash, innovation generally is not being rewarded with cash to move their therapeutics forward, she said.

There has been a wave of new fund announcements over the past several months, indicating that investors still are interested broadly in life sciences companies. San Francisco's Alta Partners, for example, hopes to raise $200 million for its next fund, and former Google Ventures chief Bill Maris will be the sole investor in a $100 million fund based in San Diego.

What's more, Biomatics Capital Partners — a Seattle firm run by Julie Sunderland, the former investment guru for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Boris Nikolic, Bill Gates' former science advisor — launched a $200 million fund. And Third Rock said in October that it had raised a $616 million fund, its fourth and largest cache of cash.

With Saxton, Pivotal has a chance to sniff out early-stage science, startups and teams. Besides two years with the Roche Venture Fund, where she was embedded at the South San Francisco headquarters of biotech giant and Roche subsidiary Genentech Inc., she was an associate with SV Life Sciences for four years. She also was business development officer and director of alliance management at the California Institute for Quantatative Biosciences, or QB3, a University of California institute.charged with bringing discoveries from bench to bedside.

Prior to that, she worked at Tularik Inc., which was bought by biotech giant Amgen Inc., Threshold Pharmaceuticals and Geron.

"I've been in biotech for 17 years," she said. "I have relationships."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/03/16/pivotal-bioventure-partners-nan-fung-group-roche.amp.html

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In some ways, Pivotal is the US-based extension of Nan Fung’s global biotech interests. And there’s something that Saxton and Cheung have in common. “We both like early-stage investments,” Saxton tells Endpoints News.

Later stages of more de-risked kinds of plays are already well funded in today’s biotech world, says Saxton, who is based in the Bay Area. She adds this new fund will back 15 to 18 new companies, with $15 million to $20 million per biotech.

CAR-T, immuno-oncology and CRISPR are all examples of the kind of advanced clinical-stage companies she probably wouldn’t get too involved in. But if you can take some new knowledge in, say, immuno-oncology and make it work in immunology, that might get her attention. Infectious diseases, immunology and rare diseases are all focuses she’s prepared to invest time and money in, from preclinical stages on through — possibly — going as late as Phase I. All of it, though, has to begin well ahead of proof-of-concept data.

https://endpts.com/new-biotech-venture-fund-debuts-with-300m-for-a-mix-of-us-and-european-players/

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