Deerfield Management

Leveraging personal data for custom-fit diagnosis and treatment

Precision Medicine

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 Adela, formerly known as DNAMx, is a company that specializes in the detection of cancer and other high-morbidity, high-mortality conditions through a blood test. Adela&rsquo;s genome-wide methylation enrichment technology offers the potential to detect many diseases with a single assay. The company operates a minimal residual disease monitoring platform intended to help in early cancer detection. The platform is able to detect tumors and classify them using plasma cell-free DNA methylomes. The platform enables doctors in cancer detection as well as prenatal diagnostics, cardiology, and monitoring of immune responses.&nbsp;
 
 
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In September 2023, the company raised USD 48 million in 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/22246">
 funding
 </a>
 with Labcorp as a new investor. The funds were allocated to enhance Adela's technological capabilities and commercialize its tissue-agnostic measurable residual disease product.&nbsp; 
 
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 Kura Oncology is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that uses a precision medicine approach to discover and develop targeted therapies designed to treat solid tumors and blood cancers.&nbsp;
 
 
 The company&rsquo;s pipeline consists of small molecule inhibitors for cancer. Lead candidate tipifarnib is an oral drug in Phase 3 trials for head and neck cancer, with Breakthrough Therapy Designation from the FDA. The company is also developing ziftomenib, a menin-KMT2A inhibitor in Phase 1 trials for acute myeloid leukemia. A next-gen farnesyl transferase inhibitor, KO-2806, received FDA IND clearance in 2022 and is in discovery for advanced solid tumors. With two late-stage assets and a growing early pipeline, Kura is advancing targeted small molecules for difficult-to-treat cancers.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 Founded in 2014, the company entered into a license agreement with Janssen in the same year that granted exclusive global rights to develop and commercialize tipifarnib. The company is obligated to pay Janssen tiered royalties if and when commercial sales of tipifarnib begin.&nbsp;
 
 
 The publicly listed company began trading on Nasdaq in 2015 under the ticker symbol &ldquo;KURA&rdquo;. 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19397">
 In June 2023 
 </a>
 , the company announced an underwritten public offering aimed&nbsp; to raise approximately USD 100 million. The net proceeds were utilized for drug candidate development and expanding clinical trials.
 
 
 In January 2024, Kura Oncology raised USD 150 million in a private placement with participation from current investors EcoR1 Capital, Deerfield Management's affiliate, and Suvretta Capital. The company expected to use the funds for research and development for Kura's clinical-stage product candidates, working capital, and other corporate expenses. Kura Oncology expects the current cash and equivalents combined with the acquired funding to sustain its operations until 2027. 
 
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Artificial intelligence is identifying and testing new therapies faster than ever.

AI Drug Discovery

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 Frontier Medicines leverages AI/ML technologies to develop treatments for cancer-causing proteins that are dismissed by traditional pharma companies as undruggable.&nbsp;
 
 
 The company has a proprietary chemoproteomic platform which entails an approach based on the interaction of small-molecule compounds and proteins to screen a large number of targets and combine them with a protein database that contains more than 150,000 novel binding pockets (hotspots). This enables it to access 90% of the human proteome that were not previously targeted due to lack of hotspots. The platform&rsquo;s AI/ML engine incorporates a library of diverse compounds, a hotspot map that serves as the starting point for understanding the druggability of a potential therapeutic target, and lead design and generation.&nbsp;
 
 
 The company focuses on oncology and immunology target and, as of February 2024, it had five wholly-owned therapeutic programs and three AbbVie-partnered programs in its pipeline. All programs were in their discovery stage, except the company&rsquo;s lead candidate, FMC-376 (activated and inactivated forms), focused on treating different cancer types, including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), colorectal carcinoma (CRC), and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), which is in the IND-enabling stage.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 The company entered a USD 100 million partnership with 
 <a href="https://news.abbvie.com/2020-12-02-AbbVie-and-Frontier-Medicines-Establish-Global-Partnership-to-Discover-and-Develop-Novel-Therapies-and-E3-Degraders-Against-Difficult-to-Drug-Targets">
 AbbVie
 </a>
 In December 2020 to develop small-molecule therapeutics against hard-to-drug protein targets including around 600 E3 ligases (the enzymes that drive the ubiquitination and degradation of proteins.&nbsp;
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In July 2021, the company raised USD 88.5 million in a 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/4347">
 Series B
 </a>
 funding round co-led by Woodline Partners LP and RA Capital Management, with equal participation from Deerfield Management Company. The proceeds were earmarked for advancing the company&rsquo;s drug pipeline and expanding operations in Boston, where its new facility was to complement the company&rsquo;s headquarters in California. 
 
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More important now than ever, telehealth will long outlast the pandemic that drove its growth.

Telehealth

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 Cohere Health provides a platform for improving the prior authorization and clinical review processes in healthcare. Its platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and streamline clinical review and prior authorization processes by applying evidence-based guidelines, integrating with electronic medical records (EMR), and facilitating communication between health plans and providers. Cohere Health offers two delivery options for its platform: Cohere PaaS and Cohere Complete. Cohere PaaS allows health plans to license the platform as a service (PaaS) and use it with their own internal staff. Cohere Complete includes the platform plus intake and clinical staff to provide fully outsourced and delegated specialty services.
 
 
 The company partners with healthcare plans and physicians, offering its platform on a subscription basis.
 
 
 Cohere Health notes that as of January 2024, it is able to immediately approve 83% of authorization requests. On requests requiring clinician review, turnaround time averages 4.5 days and just nine hours for urgent cases.&nbsp;
 
 
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In February 2024, the company raised USD 
 50 million in a funding round led by Deerfield Management, along with contributions from other investors. The raised capital was set aside to aid the company&rsquo;s expansion efforts. 
 
 
 
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Simplifying healthcare administration with intuitive tech tools

Hospital Management

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 Lumeris is an accountable care delivery innovation company offering health systems, payers, and providers operational support, technology, and consulting services. Its innovative solutions help healthcare organizations design, build, operate, measure, and optimize any accountable care model to accomplish the Triple Aim Plus One: improved quality, cost, and patient and physician satisfaction.
 
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Lumeris is an accountable care delivery innovation company offering health systems, payers, and providers operational support, technology, and consulting services. Its innovative solutions help healthcare organizations design, build, operate, measure, and optimize any accountable care model to accomplish the Triple Aim Plus One: improved quality, cost, and patient and physician satisfaction.

Relation Therapeutics is a biotechnology company that focuses on humanizing drug discovery and development. It leverages human genetics and clinical omics data and utilizes patient-derived tissue samples with functional genomics interventional experiments to identify, validate, and prosecute therapeutic programs.

BiomX discovers and develops innovative microbiome therapeutics. The Company's mission is to develop novel therapeutics for preventing and treating diseases in which microbiome imbalances have been implicated. BiomX's microbiome modulation technologies are based on the cutting-edge innovative research of its scientific collaborators: Professor Rotem Sorek, PhD and Dr. Eran Elinav, MD, PhD both of the Weizmann Institute of Science and Professor Timothy K. Lu, MD, PhD of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Frontier Medicines is a biopharmaceutical company that develops a chemoproteomics platform to accelerate the development of medicines. Its platform integrates advanced computational approaches and machine learning to discover and pharmacologically target new binding pockets on proteins that make them accessible to small-molecule drug discovery and development.

Reprieve Cardiovascular is a pioneering medical device company focused on innovative fluid management technologies for congestive heart failure. The company's Reprieve technology is being investigated as an innovative fluid management treatment. Providing clinicians with the ability to precisely control a patient’s fluid volume may both enable improved cardiac care, as well as, be instrumental in the decongestion of acutely decompensated heart failure patients (ADHF). Reprieve Cardiovascular, Inc. and RenalGuard Solutions, Inc. are subsidiaries of parent company CardioRenal Systems, Inc.

enGene is a developer of a mucosal immunotherapy platform designed to treat inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes. The company's mucosal immunotherapy platform has developed a flexible nucleotide delivery technology targeting mucosal tissues to treat numerous prevalent, chronic diseases via the induction or suppression of protein expression levels, enabling physicians and doctors to regenerate physiologic, meal-regulated insulin secretion from the gut of subjects with diabetes.

Cohere Health is a healthcare technology company, focused on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery. Cohere Health aims to simplify the complexities of the healthcare system by leveraging technology to streamline processes, enhance communication, and ultimately improve patient outcomes. The company may provide solutions to various stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem, including patients, providers, and payers.

At Kura Oncology, They are committed to realizing the promise of precision medicines for cancer.  The genomics revolution is transforming how they treat cancer. They now understand that how a patient responds to treatment depends in part on the genetic makeup of the cancer and, importantly, we have the knowledge and tools to create targeted treatments and companion diagnostics to identify those patients most likely to benefit. This new era offers the potential for innovative treatments that are safer and more effective for patients with particular cancers.  They are leveraging our insights into cancer genetics as well as our core strength of translating novel science into life-saving medicines to advance a pipeline of precision medicines. Their development programs target cancers with high unmet need, including lung, colorectal, thyroid and pancreatic cancers as well as blood cancers such as lymphoma and leukemias.

CalciMedica is engaged in the discovery and development of small molecule drugs for the treatment of inflammatory and autoimmune disorders. CalciMedica was founded in December 2006 by Gonul Velicelebi, Ph.D., Kenneth Stauderman, Ph.D. and Jack Roos, Ph.D., all previously with TorreyPines Therapeutics, where they discovered the role of STIM1 in the Icrac pathway in 2003. Other co-founders, all from the CBR Institute, include Anjana Rao, Ph.D., Patrick Hogan, Ph.D. and Stefan Feske, M.D, who identified Orai1 as the CRAC channel subunit in 2006.

Solid Biosciences is to cure Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a genetic muscle-wasting disease predominantly affecting boys, with symptoms that usually manifest between three and five years of age. DMD is a progressive, irreversible and ultimately fatal disease that affects approximately one in every 3,500 to 5,000 live male births and has an estimated prevalence of 10,000 to 15,000 cases in the United States alone. There is no cure for DMD and, for the vast majority of patients, there are no satisfactory symptomatic or disease-modifying treatments. Our lead product candidate, SGT-001, is a gene transfer under development to restore functional dystrophin protein expression in patients' muscles. Based on our preclinical program, we believe the mechanism of action of SGT-001 has the potential to slow or even halt the progression of DMD. In 2015, we began exclusively licensing the elements of the construct for SGT-001 and other elements of our gene transfer program from the University of Michigan, the University of Missouri and the University of Washington. SGT-001 has been granted Rare Pediatric Disease Designation in the US and Orphan Drug Designations in both the US and EU. Its safety and efficacy are currently being evaluated in a Phase I/II clinical trial.

Bicara Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology startup focused on developing dual-action biologics. The business is developing bifunctional antibodies that are designed to deliver an immunomodulatory payload directly to the tumor microenvironment, assisting cancer patients in increasing immune cell activity and potentially providing long-term efficacy.

Adela develops innovative and accessible technologies focusing on the detection of cancer and other high-morbidity, high-mortality conditions through a routine blood test. Adela’s genome-wide methylome enrichment platform captures information efficiently from the entire methylome. Its technology distinguishes the most-highly informative (methylated) regions of the genome from non-informative regions and preferentially targets those regions for sequencing.

Actio Biosciences involves in the development of precision medicines for homogenous rare patient populations. They develop a pipeline of new medicines with the goal to enhance the probability of clinical success and deliver medicines for all patients.

UTR Therapeutics Inc is an IND stage biotechnology company advancing mRNA Overwriting which is a spin out from City University of New York and Harvard Medical School.

Deerfield Management is a healthcare company that works across investment, information, and philanthropy. The company was founded in 1994 and is based in New York.

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