Aficamten

Braveheart Bio has flown below the radar since setting up shop last year. \n Braveheart Bio has waded into the fight for a heart disease market, paying (PDF) $65 million upfront for a rival to Bristol Myers Squibb’s Camzyos and Cytokinetics’ aficamten.Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals has facilitated Braveheart’s attempt to insert itself into the emerging rivalry between BMS and Cytokinetics. In return for $32.5 million in cash and the same amount in stock, Braveheart has landed ex-China rights to Hengrui Pharma’s selective myosin inhibitor HRS-1893. The deal includes a $10 million near-term milestone and more than $1 billion in more distant potential paydays.The outlay has secured Braveheart rights to a drug candidate that is in phase 3 development in China. Like Camzyos and aficamten, HRS-1893 is designed to treat obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy by inhibiting myosin. Camzyos and aficamten have improved patients’ oxygen capacity in phase 3 trials.  Braveheart has flown below the radar since setting up shop last year. Travis Murdoch, M.D., founded the biotech and serves as its CEO. Murdoch led HI-Bio to a $1.15 billion takeover by Biogen last year. After a stint leading Biogen’s West Coast hub, Murdoch returned to startup life with Braveheart and raised cash from Forbion and OrbiMed to support his plans. Full details of those plans are yet to emerge, but the Hengrui Pharma deal sheds some light on where the startup will direct its energy. Braveheart has ceded a big head start to BMS, which launched Camzyos in 2022, and Cytokinetics, which could receive approval for aficamten this year. While HRS-1893 is in phase 3 in China, development in the West is at an early stage. A phase 1 trial started in Australia in June.Offloading the ex-China rights to HRS-1893 extends a string of deals involving Hengrui Pharma. GSK paid $500 million upfront to enter into a broad deal with the Chinese company in July. The GSK deal arrived months after Merck & Co. paid $200 million upfront for a midphase lipoprotein(a) inhibitor. 

Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, China’s leading drug developer and producer of one of the largest pipelines in the entire biopharma industry, has outlicensed another candidate to a US biotech. This time, Hengrui is teaming up with Braveheart Bio, a new company led by Travis Murdoch. Murdoch is the former CEO of HI-Bio , the immunology startup that Biogen bought for $1.15 billion last year. Hengrui will hand over most of the global rights to HRS-1893, a selective myosin inhibitor, in exchange for $65 million upfront, $10 million in the near term, and up to $1.01 billion in biobucks, according to a regulatory filing on Friday. The $65 million upfront is evenly split between cash and Braveheart shares. The investigational treatment is in Phase 3 development in China for obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (oHCM). Hengrui will keep the rights to HRS-1893 in China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. In an interview on Friday morning, Murdoch declined to share specifics of the development plan for HRS-1893 outside of China, but said more details will be released in the coming months. “This obviously is a cornerstone asset that really enables us to quickly become a late-stage development company, which is a great place to be right now in a therapeutic class that is growing,” Murdoch said. The deal earns Hengrui even more cash to bankroll its R&D efforts. The Shanghai-listed company went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in May to bring in another $1 billion-plus in funds. The move positions Braveheart squarely in contention with Cytokinetics, which is developing a similar type of drug called aficamten. Bristol Myers Squibb’s myosin inhibitor, marketed as Camzyos, has been approved for oHCM since 2022. Last weekend, Cytokinetics presented more data on the experimental medicine at the European Society of Cardiology’s annual meeting. The company said it could change the standard of care for oHCM. Its stock price $CYTK climbed about 30% on the data earlier this week. “The Cyto data, from our point of view, really points to the notion that this class could be one that replaces beta blockade. The beta blockers have been part of standard of care for decades in this disease,” Murdoch said. The cardiac myosin inhibitor class could also apply to other areas, Murdoch said. He pointed to the Phase 3 trial of Camzyos in non-obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or nHCM. Camzyos missed the mark on both primary endpoints, according to study results also presented last weekend at ESC. “Although those data were negative, some of the post-hoc analyses of those studies suggest actually that a better molecule could be successful there,” Murdoch said. “What we’re seeing is that the class is not only becoming more important within obstructive HCM, but is showing potential opportunity beyond. It’s incumbent on us at Braveheart to really optimize the development plan of this molecule, which we do think stacks up very favorably against the other” drugs in this class. Braveheart is keeping many details of its business quiet, including how much funding it has received so far. But the Bay Area company has likely corralled hefty commitments, given its investor base of Forbion and OrbiMed. These two veteran firms have repeatedly built biotechs revolving around assets from China. They previously teamed up on Verdiva Bio , an obesity drug developer that launched with $411 million in January. After publication, a Braveheart spokesperson noted that a16z Bio + Health is also an investor in the new company. The Braveheart deal marks at least the 35th China-to-West licensing pact of the year, according to an Endpoints News tally. Earlier this week, Raymond James bankers said the industry is already on pace to break last year’s record dealmaking between Chinese biotechs and Western drug developers. Hengrui, which is more than a half-century old, has been a frequent benefactor of US and European companies’ recent interest in the burgeoning drug R&D scene in China. It’s inked major deals this year, including another cardio-focused move with Merck and a whopping $12 billion biobuck-loaded pact with GSK. Editor’s note: This story was updated to include an interview with Braveheart Bio CEO Travis Murdoch and to note that a16z Bio + Health is an investor.