Ouro Medicines, Inc.

The founders also announced plans to donate a share of their proceeds to form a new public charity called Vie Ventures Foundation.\n Two veteran biotech investors have reunited to form a new venture capital firm focusing on autoimmune diseases. Steven St. Peter, M.D., and Luke Evnin, Ph.D., launched Vie Ventures to funnel money toward biotechs raising series B and C rounds.The new outfit is launching with a suite of notable non-profit collaborators, including the Crohn\'s and Colitis Foundation, Lupus Research Alliance, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Scleroderma Research Foundation and Sjögren\'s Foundation, according to a July 9 release. The firm has also tapped the former CEO of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Lou DeGennaro, Ph.D., to head up collaboration strategy as a senior advisor.“We see a compelling opportunity to leverage our team’s decades of differentiated experience to serve as a bridge between disease-focused philanthropies and the for-profit world funding therapeutics,\" St. Peter said in the release. \"This bridge is unique, and we believe it will enable us to make more informed investment decisions, be a value-added investment partner for our portfolio companies, and increase the probability they succeed.\"St. Peter will serve as the firm’s managing director and Evnin as a senior advisor. The duo previously spent a decade together at MPM BioImpact (formerly MPM Capital), a Boston-based VC that has made notable investments in psychedelic and RNA companies in recent years.St. Peter left MPM in 2012 and in 2019 became managing director of the T1D Fund, a venture fund that invests in drug development for type 1 diabetes. Evnin, for his part, has been the chairperson of the Scleroderma Research Foundation for more than 20 years.The Vie founders also announced plans to donate a share of their own proceeds to form the new public charity Vie Ventures Foundation. The charity\'s mission is to “accelerate innovation in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases,” according to the release. Several immune-focused biotechs have unveiled this year, including Ouro Medicines in January with $120 million, Hillstar Bio in March with $67 million and Merida Biosciences in April with $121 million.One of the largest autoimmune fundraises of 2025 so far is Abcuro’s $200 million series C in February. The Sanofi-backed biotech is using the money to push its anti-KLRG1 antibody through a pivotal phase 2/3 muscle wasting disease trial. 

The Column Group’s drug R&D team, known as TCG Labs Soleil, has been busy churning out new portfolio companies since it unveiled with a $400 million-plus fund in February. And on Tuesday, one of its startups announced its first cross-border deal — a licensing pact for an en vogue modality developed by a biotech in China, one of the industry’s hottest R&D regions. Soleil’s Juri Biosciences snagged the exclusive global license to a KLK2- and CD3-targeting T cell engager from EpimAb Biotherapeutics, according to the companies. The Shanghai-based startup will get up to $210 million in upfront payments and biobucks. The details of the terms were kept under wraps. The tie-up is at least the 19th China-to-US biopharma deal so far in 2025, according to an Endpoints News tally. Drug giants like Pfizer, Merck, AstraZeneca and AbbVie are all collaborating with Chinese biotechs on China-grown assets, as are scrappier outfits backed by Western investors like Ouro Medicines and Verdiva Bio. EpimAb has also benefited from the growing interest in China’s biotech sector. The company, which disclosed a $120 million Series C in 2021, has forged deals with Almirall , Vignette Bio , Candid Therapeutics and Medigene . In a statement, EpimAb CEO Chengbin Wu said the deal with Juri “further validated” its T cell engager platform. The platform once focused on immunology and hematology but has now expanded into solid tumors. With Juri’s help, EpimAb’s unnamed T cell engager will “soon” be clinically investigated for metastatic prostate cancer, Soleil CEO and TCG Labs managing partner Jin-Long Chen said in an interview. The asset targets kallikrein-related peptidase 2, or KLK2, which is expressed in prostate tissues and has “very, very limited expression in healthy tissues,” Chen said. “If you can get that really specific target where you can achieve a good therapeutic index, you get this really long durability efficacy, which is so unique for the T cell engager mechanism,” Soleil chief scientific officer Josh Lichtman said. “With this very specific profile, the combinations with other oncology approaches, including ADCs, chemotherapies, and in prostate cancer specifically, androgen receptor modulators, is very promising.” Guiding the Juri team will be scientific advisor Charles Sawyers, who directs the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He co-discovered the prostate cancer treatment marketed as Xtandi. Juri is part of Soleil’s broad portfolio of about 10 companies, according to COO Lucinda Quan. The Column Group last year announced the launch of TCG Labs Soleil, with a mission to pair TCG’s venture funding with an R&D lab that creates single-asset companies and takes them to clinical proof of concept before handing them off to larger biopharmas that can take them to market. So far, Soleil’s apparatus spans a wide range of therapeutic categories, including cardiovascular, autoimmune and cancer.