Orbis Medicines ApS

Can AI make an avatar of Mikael Dolsten? The former chief scientific officer of Pfizer will try to find out now that he’s starting a new chapter at Formation Bio after nearly 16 years at the New York pharma giant. In one of his first interviews since leaving Pfizer, Dolsten exclusively told Endpoints News that he is leading a drug-picking committee at Formation Bio, an AI-focused biopharma. In addition to chairing that group, he will serve as a strategic advisor to Formation Bio, a deeply ambitious company that has raised over $600 million, including a $372 million Series D last June . Formation Bio CEO Benjamine Liu said Dolsten brings 30-plus years of experience knowing what a great drug program looks like. He’ll help Formation Bio — which is pursuing a Roivant-esque model of picking up assets — select which drugs to in-license. But Liu said he also hopes Dolsten’s input can help teach AI models to basically imitate how Dolsten and other veteran drug hunters make these calls. “The thing we’re trying to do with Mikael is: How do we recapitulate what an AI Mikael looks like?” Liu said in an interview, saying he hopes experts like Dolsten can train the AI system how to make decisions and evaluate opportunities. Dolsten, 66, has wasted little time kicking off his post-Pfizer tenure. His last day at the drugmaker was Feb. 28, and he started working with Formation Bio on March 1. His role at Formation Bio will be announced later on Wednesday. He’s also building “Mikael’s ecosystem,” a mix of about 10 life sciences companies that he’s working with. Dolsten described his Pfizer tenure as “a fabulous run exceeding my wildest aspirations,” adding that he started to plan his departure about two years ago. Dolsten’s exit was first announced in July, and he helped choose Chris Boshoff as his successor. Leaving Pfizer was his own decision, he said, and wasn’t influenced by Starboard Value’s activist campaign. All told, Dolsten brought more than 35 products through approval, including the Covid-19 vaccine, Comirnaty. “I just felt that it would be hard to beat a lot of those amazing things we accomplished,” Dolsten said. “I felt intrigued by working in a new environment.” Dolsten’s other roles include board seats at the instrument maker Agilent Technologies, the New York AI biotech Immunai , and the Danish macrocycle biotech Orbis Medicines . He said he is also helping launch a new biotech startup with a serial entrepreneur from Yale University. That said, he’s spending relatively more time on his Formation Bio role, estimating he spends about a day per week at the company. Also on Formation’s drug-picking committee is its newly-hired chief business officer David Steinberg, a co-founder and former executive at PureTech Health. Steinberg joined in October. Dolsten described his conversations with Liu over the past few months as a key factor in his decision to join the company. He described Liu as a “high-energy AI magician with a vision.” One of Formation’s newest projects is using AI, particularly the latest generation of deep research tools , to create an atlas of all possible drug targets. This includes scouring press releases, scientific conference abstracts, company websites and more to aggregate up-to-date reports for each target. The goal, Liu said, is an “equivalent of RA Capital’s atlas , but instead of 50 PhDs, we have AI systems go through target by target.” With about 150 employees right now, Formation Bio is betting that AI-based workflows can be more efficient than a 100,000-person pharma company. Dolsten said he’s impressed by what today’s AI systems can produce, compared to the conventional way that large drugmakers like Pfizer and AstraZeneca operated while he worked there. “So much of that work required advisory committees, multiple business development meetings, and now can happen in the instant of a moment,” Dolsten said, estimating that about 80% of that work can happen in 30 minutes using these AI systems.

AstraZeneca is further investing in China, opening an R&D center in Beijing and inking a pair of majorly backloaded R&D deals with Chinese drug developers. The Harbour BioMed and Syneron Bio deals are each potentially worth more than $3.4 billion, and the tie-ups cement AstraZeneca’s presence in China, a market that comprised 12% of the UK pharma giant’s revenue in 2024. Its sales in China were up 11% last year. “We see a strong opportunity, and we are fully committed to continue growing in China,” Iskra Reic, who is now running AstraZeneca’s China operations, said during an earnings call in February. AstraZeneca has positioned itself as one of the leading Western drugmakers in the world’s second most populous country — and one of the biggest pharmaceutical markets. It’s also been dealing with an investigation into former China head Leon Wang and other workers there since last year. The announcements build on AstraZeneca’s existing presence in China. The company said last month it was buying FibroGen’s local unit for $160 million. It acquired CAR-T maker Gracell Biotechnologies for $1 billion upfront in 2023 and has disclosed major licensing deals with CSPC in dyslipidemia and with Eccogene in obesity. The company has an R&D site in Shanghai. The new deals also strengthen China’s bustling biotech scene, which has jumped into the global spotlight in recent years thanks to its evolution from a fast-follower market to an innovation-based environment. Harbour has been a beneficiary, forging several licensing deals with new companies set up by Western investors, including Windward Bio . For Harbour, this marks an evolution from years of asset-focused deals — including with AbbVie , Pfizer and two agreements with AstraZeneca — to a “multi-program, multi-therapeutic area, multiyear partnership,” CEO Jingsong Wang said in an interview. “This is definitely a great turning point for us to have a large-scale strategic partnership,” Wang told Endpoints News on Friday. He founded Harbour in 2016 after serving as the head of Sanofi’s China R&D. Harbour has set up operations in multiple cities in China, the Boston area and Rotterdam. According to Friday’s announcement, AstraZeneca can opt in to a series of Harbour’s multispecific antibodies that span immunology, cancer and other disease areas. Through a $105 million equity investment that translates to a 9.15% stake in Harbour, AstraZeneca will also become one of the top five largest shareholders in the Hong Kong-listed company, according to a regulatory filing . In addition to the equity investment, Harbour gets an upfront payment, near-term biobucks and option exercise fees for a total of $175 million, up to $4.4 billion in development and commercial milestones, plus tiered royalties. To start, AstraZeneca gets the option to license two undisclosed preclinical immunology programs. The pharma behemoth can also nominate more targets for Harbour’s multispecific antibodies, and AstraZeneca can license those programs as well. If AstraZeneca decides to double down after the first five years of their collaboration, the agreement could last a decade. AstraZeneca is tapping into a macrocyclic peptide R&D platform in the deal with Beijing-based Syneron. The duo will explore the platform across chronic, metabolic, autoimmune and rare diseases. The deal includes an undisclosed equity investment, $75 million across upfront and near-term payments, up to $3.4 billion in development and commercial biobucks, and tiered royalties, according to Syneron’s press release . There is growing interest in macrocyclic treatments, or ring-like drugs, with macrocyclic developer Orbis Medicines already announcing a €90 million funding round this year.

iStock/ somdul After the successful development of mavacamten and the sale of MyoKardia to BMS in 2020, former executives of the biotech are back together with a mission to make cardiovascular disease curable and preventable. Capping off a flurry of mega-round launches this week, Kardigan debuted Friday with an all-star cast and an ambitious mission: to unseat cardiovascular disease as the leading cause of death worldwide. The San Francisco and New Jersey–based company announced the closing of a $300 million Series A round led by Perceptive Advisors, ARCH Venture Partners and Sequoia Heritage. Helmed by former MyoKardia CEO Tassos Gianakakos, Kardigan is taking a targeted approach to cardiovascular disease. The biotech’s platform “leverages a proprietary set of cardiac-specific tools that enable a deep understanding of the mechanisms across its therapeutic candidates as well as patients’ individualized responses to treatment,” according to its Friday press release . “For decades, our team has observed significant treatment gaps across cardiovascular disease - from clinical care to investment in new medicines,” Gianakakos said in the statement. “While current standards of care play an important role, collectively, they fail to address the global health emergency in front of us.” Kardigan is the latest play from Gianakakos and fellow MyoKardia alumni Jay Edelberg (chief medical officer at Kardigan) and Bob McDowell (the new company’s chief scientific officer). The execs led the development of mavacamten, which in 2022 became the first FDA-approved cardiac myosin inhibitor specifically targeting the source of obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The approval was granted to Bristol Myers Squibb, which acquired MyoKardia for $13.1 billion in October 2020. The team’s initial focus at Kardigan will be on disease opportunities and patient segments that are resistant or poorly managed on current therapies, including primary and secondary cardiomyopathies leading to heart failure, according to the press release. The cardiovascular space—and cardiomyopathies specifically—are experiencing a renaissance of late with the November 2024 FDA approval of Attruby for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM). The greenlight set up a head-to-head competition with Pfizer’s Vyndaqel and Vyndamax (tafamidis) in an increasingly crowded space that could soon see the addition of Alnylam’s Amvuttra (vutrisiran). In a recent interview with BioSpace , Tenaya Therapeutics CEO Faraz Ali said it is currently a “golden era for cardiomyopathies,” noting the advent of multiple modalities, including gene therapies. Tenaya itself is developing an investigational gene therapy for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy targeting mutations in the MYBPC3 gene. As biopharma gets set for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference next week, several new companies have burst onto the scene. Also on Friday, GSK-based Ouro Medicines announced that it had raised $115 million to advance a pipeline of T cell engagers. In the obesity space, Verdiva Bio broke cover Thursday with $411 million in Series A funds to develop a potentially first-in-class oral GLP-1 receptor agonist and other next-gen therapies. And on Wednesday, Tenvie Therapeutics launched with $200 million and assets from Denali Therapeutics to go after neurological diseases. Rounding out the group was Denmark’s oral medicine–focused Orbis Medicines , which raised a $93.2 million Series A and added Eli Lilly to its stable of investors.