Autistic Disorder

Partnership to Support Company's Deeply Experienced Existing Leadership Team and Thoughtful Execution of Expansion Roadmap NEW YORK, May 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- NexPhase Capital, LP ("NexPhase" or "NPC"), a thematically driven and operationally focused private equity firm, today announced the acquisition of Behavior Frontiers, a leading provider of Applied Behavior Analysis ("ABA") treatment services for individuals with autism and other special needs. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Behavior Frontiers was founded in 2004 by its CEO Helen Mader to bring consistent, high-quality care backed by cutting-edge research and data-driven practices to individuals with autism across all age groups, with a particular emphasis on early intervention care for children between the ages of 3 to 6 years old. Today, the company operates 26 centers and provides home-based care across 12 states, helping thousands of patients and their families through the creation and provision of comprehensive and individualized ABA treatment programs. The company's daily operations are supported by its proprietary software, PrioraCare, a clinically focused practice management platform designed specifically for the delivery of ABA services. "We are excited to be partnering with Helen and the incredible team she has built at Behavior Frontiers, which has brought transformative care to thousands of children and families over the past two decades," said Andy Kieffer, Partner at NexPhase. "NexPhase has tremendous conviction in this business and its potential to serve more families in existing and new markets across the country. We look forward to leveraging our resources and significant experience working alongside leading ABA providers to help Behavior Frontiers continue delivering on its mission to provide personalized care for every child—one milestone at a time." "This is an important milestone for Behavior Frontiers and a testament to the commitment of our management team and clinicians," said Mrs. Mader. "We are thrilled to be partnering with Andy and the NexPhase team, whose resources and demonstrated ability to advance healthcare and ABA businesses will be critical assets for Behavior Frontiers as we continue to execute on our mission. We have worked tirelessly to develop our unique center- and home-based care model, all supported by our PrioraCare technology, and we are confident that it can be scaled and brought to dozens of new markets—without compromising the high-quality, individualized care on which our patients rely. Together, we look forward to making our vision a reality and supporting more people and families across the country." NexPhase has a strong track record of investing in and driving sustainable, long-term growth at companies across the autism therapy, healthcare, and software development sectors. NexPhase Operating Partners Barbara B. Hill, a seasoned healthcare executive who has served as the CEO of multiple national healthcare services companies, and John King, who brings significant leadership experience across the healthcare and software sectors, will work closely with the Behavior Frontiers team to support the company's continued growth. Following the close of the transaction, Behavior Frontiers will continue to be run by its current management team. About Behavior Frontiers Behavior Frontiers is a leading provider of ABA treatment services for individuals with autism and other special needs. With a commitment to clinical quality, innovation, and access, the company serves clients through home- and center-based models across the United States. For more information, please visit . About NexPhase Capital NexPhase Capital is a thematically driven and operationally focused lower middle-market private equity firm that makes investments in growth-oriented and capital-efficient companies within three distinct industry verticals: healthcare, software and consumer. NexPhase partners with companies that have reached a growth inflection point and are seeking a value-added partner to help navigate the company's "next phase." The NexPhase team has extensive industry and operational experience and NPC's Partners have invested together for over 15 years. NexPhase has completed over 100 investments, including add-ons, and targets equity investments between $40 million and $150 million. Since inception, NexPhase has raised and managed approximately $2.6 billion of capital. For more information, please visit . Contacts Media: Kate Thompson / Erik Carlson Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher 212-355-4449 SOURCE NexPhase Capital WANT YOUR COMPANY'S NEWS FEATURED ON PRNEWSWIRE.COM? 440k+ Newsrooms & Influencers 9k+ Digital Media Outlets 270k+ Journalists Opted In GET STARTED

Deerfield Management is back with its third healthcare venture fund, this time securing more than $600 million to create new drug development outfits, medical technology startups and adjacent computational software companies. That’s five years after its $840 million venture fund was announced in 2020. Deerfield Healthcare Innovations Fund III will help support the firm’s in-house drug discovery and medical technology teams in New York City at the 12-story Cure campus. Its sprawling ecosystem encompasses 29 research institution collaborations, including a 10-year deal with the University of Chicago announced earlier this year. The fund adds to the pool of capital available to the life sciences community, which is sorely in need of bright spots after a multiyear downturn. Other investment firms have disclosed new funds this year, including Aditum Bio , Curie.Bio and a16z’s new fund backed by Eli Lilly . Deerfield has about 25 drugs in development and is currently invested in about 150 companies, managing partner James Flynn told Endpoints News . Recently departed Sanofi CSO Frank Nestle is CEO of Deerfield Discovery and Development, which is the internal team that works to take experimental drugs and devices to key inflection points within about three or four years before packaging them into new companies, Flynn said. Overall, Deerfield has about $15 billion in assets under management, Flynn said. That includes three buckets: a public fund, a fund dedicated to private investing with an emphasis on structured finance, and then the Healthcare Innovations unit, which focuses on launching burgeoning companies, the managing partner added. The firm’s portfolio includes companies like Nuvalent and Neomorph. Nuvalent started as an idea out of Harvard University to create drugs for treatment-resistant cancers. Deerfield seeded the company and then wholly contributed to a $50 million Series A in 2021. It quickly went public via an IPO later that year and today is a $5.5 billion drug developer, by market capitalization. However, the industry is currently weathering one of the longest dry spells for biotech initial public offerings in Flynn’s three-plus-decade career in healthcare investing. That’s pressuring earlier-stage companies, especially private startups looking to pull together syndicates. Neomorph is an example of one of those companies that is trying to drum up investor support but is finding it difficult, even with broad pipelines and multiple industry partnerships. The fledgling company was born out of Deerfield’s work with Dana-Farber and their collaboration on the Center for Protein Degradation. The San Diego biotech has signed pharma tie-ups with AbbVie, Biogen and Novo Nordisk in the past 16 months, but it’s “hard to do a syndicated round right now,” Flynn said. The firm has also invested in gene therapy outfits, like Chicago-area Jaguar Gene Therapy, which recently entered the clinic with an investigational medicine for a genetic form of autism. But Deerfield is taking a “very careful” approach to the field right now because it’s been “exceptionally difficult to get gene therapy companies funded,” Flynn said. “I do think the new FDA is whispering encouraging things relative to products targeting smaller markets, and they seem to be very open to surrogates, even novel surrogates,” Flynn said. “We do have some rare disease companies right now that are getting that kind of feedback about their products.” Deerfield’s fund will also place an emphasis on software companies in the healthcare field. The firm will about double its software team this year, from 15 people to more than 30, Flynn said. It includes a computational chemistry group that has helped form companies like Excelsior Sciences, which is a mixture of medical technology, software and a drug discovery platform that has been in development for nearly three years, he said.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that moving forward, all new vaccines will need to be tested in placebo-controlled trials before they can win FDA approval, calling it “a radical departure from past practices.” In reality, experts say, placebo-controlled trials for new vaccines have been standard practice for decades. Kennedy’s statement, given by an HHS spokesperson and first published in the Washington Post Wednesday evening, says, “All new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure — a radical departure from past practices.” The alleged shift from Kennedy on placebo-controlled trials comes as the FDA’s most recent guidance from October 2023 to Covid vaccine manufacturers makes clear that “later phase trials, including efficacy trials, should be randomized, double-blinded, and placebo controlled.” Kennedy also noted in his statement, which HHS did not provide a timeline on implementing, that “none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products.” Aaron Kesselheim, professor of medicine at Harvard, and Paul Offit, a pediatrician and member of the FDA’s vaccines advisory committee, told Endpoints News that physicians actually do know quite a lot about the risk profiles of every one of these vaccines on the recommended schedule for children. “I don’t know if they’re trying to parse words by saying ‘inert’ but the idea that we ‘know very little’ about the risk profiles of vaccines that have been used safely around the world in hundreds of millions or even billions of patients for decades is patently ridiculous,” Kesselheim said. A review of all vaccine approvals from 2006-2020, published in Health Affairs in 2021 and co-authored by Kesselheim, found that more than eight out of 10 vaccines approved by the FDA in that time period were tested against placebo or active comparators in pivotal trials when placebo was unethical. For example, a vaccine for rotavirus for children, Merck’s RotaTeq, was placebo-controlled and the data were published in 2008. On Kennedy’s mention of “inert” placebos, which is how the FDA defines every placebo, Offit added that companies typically use placebos, although that doesn’t preclude the use of some non-active buffering or stabilizing agents that might also be in the vaccine. “Oftentimes vaccine developers use buffering or stabilizing agents in placebos as part of their trials to parse out potential safety issues,” Offit said. “You want to know what the adverse reaction is to, and is it to the vaccine part, or is it to a buffering agent or stabilizing agent, or manufacturing, or what?” Kennedy has also touted the idea of reforming the FDA’s vaccine and drug adverse event database, known as VAERS, which currently has limited use because all of the data are self-reported and don’t encompass all of the adverse event data. But the details of how Kennedy will change the database remain unknown. Offit said he thinks Kennedy might use the updated database to further the disproven idea that vaccines cause autism.