Today's news brings a collab with Pearl Bio, which is a spinoff of the work of the legendary George Church (think re-animating wooly mammoths, here!), and some very well-respected Yale biologists (pictured). It is being run through a Series A round by former lawyer Amy Cayne-Schwartz -- also with a Yale affiliated pedigree, and has raised quite a bit already. As it is private, of course, exact terms have not been disclosed, but many power players in bio- space are piling in.
Here's the latest, on the story from Fierce Biotech, but this whole relationship is clearly not (yet) material to massive Merck:
. . .Merck has signed up to Pearl Bio’s synthetic biology platform, offering up to $1 billion in biobucks for potentially cancer-busting biologics.
The collaboration could pile more biologics onto Merck’s pipeline and serves as validation for Pearl, which emerged from stealth in June 2023 with the backing of Khosla Ventures. Merck is paying an undisclosed upfront fee and offering up to $1 billion in milestone payments for Pearl to identify biologics to treat cancer.
The biotech describes itself as creating “template-directed biomaterials with tunable properties.” Co-founder, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Business Officer Amy Cayne Schwartz elaborated in an email to Fierce Biotech, describing how the platform can “encode synthetic chemistries to tune therapeutic properties (e.g., half-life, drug antibody ratio).” The company is in the process of raising its series A round, she told Fierce. . . .
Onward, into the warming sunshine here, then. . . smiling. As we've said before -- we applaud Church's creativity, but we aren't sure the world is quite ready for (nor in need of) the "de-extinction" of wooly mammoths, genetically crossed with modern Asian elephants' DNA.
In any event -- ever smiling.
नमस्ते
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