Michael Wong

Novartis pens ProFound pact, offering up $750M biobucks per cardiovascular target Novartis is penning a four-year pact with ProFound Therapeutics to create new therapeutics for heart disease, with $750 million in biobucks up for grabs per target. | Novartis is penning a four-year p...

Huge congrats to the ProFound Therapeutics and @novartis.bsky.social teams on kicking off this exciting relationship to discover and develop novel protein drugs and drug targets in cardiovascular disease. www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/nova...

Who’s at #BIO2025 ?

My son’s piano teacher asks me to practice duets with him… I feel like I’m the one taking lessons again!

Congrats Sam!

Unbelievably rapid shift in landscape. Curious how this compared to other industries. This is a massive injection of pharma funding into Chinese biotech industry (and continued injection as milestones and royalties are triggered) that will also have downstream implications on innovation.

Good PoV. While Canada does need to strengthen its domestic market, it won’t be sustaining a standalone ecosystem anytime soon.
The key near-term opportunities will be to double-down on investments into science/biotech and lock in its place as the next preferred global partner for innovation.

Congrats to Jason and Ampersand team on the raise.

Flagship's Ampersand gets Eli Lilly's support in $65M Series B Ampersand Biomedicines, a biotech working on medicines

Ampersand Biomedicines raises $65M in Series B with backing from Eli Lilly to advance targeted biologics.

🍀 👌

Really cool application of technology leading to uncovering of new biology.

Canada (and much of the world) is overly reliant on the US for biopharmaceutical innovations.

The NIH cutdown combined with an ensuing trade war will inevitably impact our future access to medicines from the US.

Canada needs to build up its own scalable, sustainable biopharmaceutical sector.

Hopefully will have a chance to connect at another mutual event before the Timmerman 20th!

Amazing event indeed. Roast was a bit on the light side, but it’s hard to roast such a nice guy!

Love this visualization from the pharmas FY financials showing breakdown of where money came in from and how it was spent.

Not the most inspiring title…

AstraZeneca invests $570M to grow in Canada, plans to add 700 jobs AstraZeneca is expanding its boot print in Canada with a $570 million investment designed to create 700 jobs. | AstraZeneca is expanding its boot print in Canada with a $570 million investment designe...

Great to see continued growth on “Pill Hill” 🇨🇦

www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/astr...

Immune evasion through mitochondrial transfer in the tumour microenvironment - Nature Mitochondria with mutations in their DNA from cancer cells can be transferred to T cells in the tumour microenvironment, which leads to T cell dysfunction and impaired antitumour immunity.

Organelle transfer is an area of biology that never ceases to amaze. A lot of creative mechanisms that cancer cells could teach us for avoiding immunogenicity.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

US biotechs need to ensure they are spending $$ innovating in highly novel and differentiated biology, as it is going to be near impossible to outcompete China head-on. Their growing prominence was clear in ADC deal boom 2 yrs ago, obesity and multispecifics last yr - where next?

Recharged by the inspiring discussions with current and prospective partners at #JPM2025. Our industry undoubtedly has flaws but there are a lot of great people at the helm seeking to make a difference in drug discovery and healthcare.
Now back to the bitter cold week ahead in Boston…

Tons do this, but perhaps this is of a much larger scale with $500M from a single pharma

As a Canadian, it is painful to watch #Canada continue to struggle with global leadership. This is not only true of national politics - but also of Canada’s #biotech sector, where the lack of leaders generally has been a key bottleneck to realizing the potential of its science and current ventures.

We are having #JPM2025 networking event on 1/14 at Persona. Meet our #BiotechHangout co-hosts and other colleagues with open bar thanks to our generous sponsors register here docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... #BioSky

Who’s going to be at #JPM2025?

What’s the Bluesky equivalent of a Tweet-up?

Well, this has got to be one of the coolest and funniest gifts I’ve ever received.

Took a look after you pointed this out - amazing!

Tessera Therapeutics Receives Investment to Develop Curative In Vivo… Pioneering Gene Writing™, a new biotechnology designed to offer the ability to make almost any change to the genome curing diseases at their source.

Congrats to the Tessera team on new partnership with Gates Foundation to receive up to $50M to develop globally accessible in vivo genetic therapies for sickle cell disease www.tesseratherapeutics.com/news/tessera...

Not sure if US-China biopharma will get on their radar as there seems to still be primary focus on tech and AI. But deals like this are in-licensing Chinese innovation into US, where the US pharma will still ultimately be seller of the product.

Target diversification is certainly one way but the rapid advancements in novel/alt modalities is a clear sign that they are very capable and continuing to move upstream in the innovation cycle. If you look at all the ADC deals that China sold last year, it made the US look asleep at the wheel.

If we truly believe in capitalism, there’s no reason the competitive forces can’t come globally! This is a good pressure on US biotechs to force themselves to continue innovating.