Bimagrumab

iStock, leremy Biohaven has suffered a few setbacks in recent months, including an FDA rejection and a missed $150 million benchmark payment, but CEO Vlad Coric looked for the brighter side at JPM, specifically emphasizing a serendipitous discovery that could get the company in the obesity game. Vlad Coric seems unfazed by the crowd of people milling around Union Square in San Francisco. This is apparently Coric’s default demeanor, as the Biohaven CEO also appears largely unbothered by the myriad setbacks that have hit his company in recent months. That includes a recent mid-stage miss in major depressive disorder, a November 2025 FDA rejection in a rare neurodegenerative disease and a corresponding $150 million capital opportunity lost. Instead, he tells me about the company’s plans to repurpose its spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) drug taldefgrobep alfa, which flunked a Phase III trial in late 2024, as a muscle-sparing drug for use alongside GLP-1s like Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy or Eli Lilly’s Zepbound. He specifically points to bimagrumab, for which Lilly paused a clinical trial last September. “A lot of folks who don’t want to take GLP-1s are concerned about the muscle loss and the bone density effects,” Coric told BioSpace on the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. “The only thing that I think limited Lilly’s bimagrumab was the side effects. They had very high rates of side effects. We’re not seeing the side effects that Lilly ran into.” Notably, Lilly did not report a reason for pausing the bimagrumab trial in September. Biohaven made a serendipitous discovery following the trial of taldefgrobep alfa for SMA—a neuromuscular disease that causes destruction of motor neurons; participants saw reduced weight and preservation of lean muscle and bone density while on the drug. Biohaven Is recruiting patients living with obesity or who are overweight for a Phase II study, which is set to complete in September 2026. FDA FDA Reversals Send UniQure, Biohaven, Capricor, More Into a ‘Tailspin’ Since July, several biotechs have been forced to pivot as previous agreements with the FDA around evidence required for approval were reversed, a phenomenon that, according to experts, could portend a more restrictive regulator. November 24, 2025 · 7 min read · Heather McKenzie Read More While the pivot is significant and the competition fierce, Coric appears undaunted. In fact, he seems only to see an opportunity. Bimagrumab is an inhibitor that blocks activin type II receptors, preventing its inhibitory action on muscle growth while potentially causing side effects, Coric said, while taldefgrobep alfa uses a different mechanism of action to inhibit a different protein, myostatin, which itself regulates muscle size. “So we think we could deliver bimagrumab-like efficacy without the side effects. That’s a winning pro a monotherapy.” Like You’re Going To Run It Forever The Biohaven brand has had its successes. In 2022 Pfizer bought Biohaven Pharmaceutical for $11.6 billion , largely to acquire its successful migraine treatment program. Coric took a pipeline of experimental products from what remained and spun out a second company, Biohaven Ltd., trading under Biohaven Pharma’s original stock ticker. The new company hasn’t yet been able to reproduce the original’s commercial achievements. When Biohaven’s spinocerebellar ataxia treatment troriluzole was rejected by the FDA in November 2025, the company also missed out on a $150 million payment from investment firm Oberland Capital. But Biohaven is resilient. The company went to Wall Street to raise more funds, seeking a $150 million public offering but ending up with $200 million. Then, on January 7 just ahead of JPM, the investment firm Janus Henderson bought $125 million in shares of Biohaven. “That’s 10% of the company” Coric said. “We’re well capitalized.” Coric’s confidence appears to stem from Biohaven’s diverse pipeline. He pointed repeatedly to BHV-1300, a protein degrader therapy for autoimmune conditions. That drug scored in March 2025 when it showed a deep reduction in IgG proteins after a four-week Phase I trial. For all of this swagger, however, it seems Coric and Biohaven came to the conference with something to prove to the rest of the biopharma world. “I think coming into [JPM26], we wanted to make sure we were well-funded, we could show people our exciting data and focus on the degrader platform as the future.” Despite the rollercoaster trajectory of the second iteration of Biohaven, Coric seems intent to keep the company running as its own entity—for the time being—although he is open to a potential buyout. “I’m a firm believer you should run your company like you’re going to own it forever,” he said, “but if somebody comes in and gives you a good offer, you’ll always consider that, as we did for [Pfizer].” .responsive-container { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; border: 1px solid #ededed; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, Sans-Serif; padding: 20px 20px 10px 20px; } .column-left { flex: 1; max-width: 45%; padding: 20px 20px 10px 20px; } .column-right { flex: 2; padding: 20px 20px 10px 20px; } @media (max-width: 768px) { .column-left, .column-right { max-width: 100%; flex: 100%; padding: 10px 0; } } Subscribe to BioPharm Executive! 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London-based VC firm Medicxi has secured €500 million ($581 million) for a new fund dedicated to biotech creation and some “opportunistic” later-stage investments that could transform patient care. The oversubscribed fund , called Medicxi V, was backed by existing LPs and a few new investors, including “long-term institutionals, large pension funds, endowments, and a small number of long-term family offices,” partner Giovanni Mariggi told Endpoints News in an interview. Medicxi is not looking to develop brand-new technologies from scratch, but rather to combine new biological discoveries with de-risked technologies in order to address unmet medical needs, Mariggi said. The firm is already working with antibody-drug conjugates, multispecific antibodies and antibody oligoconjugates, he added. “Once there’s conviction around unmet need, opportunity, market fit and a belief that there’s a higher-than-average probability of success, we can create [something] de novo or look around to see if there are existing assets we can bring in that address [the need,]” Mariggi said. That approach underscored Medicxi’s founding of Vicebio in 2019, which was spun out of tech developed at the University of Queensland in Australia. “What we liked about this technology was that we had a very clear first killer application for it, so when we met the scientists…we very quickly said: ‘Look, this could be a fantastic way to develop a multivalent respiratory vaccine,’” Mariggi added. In September 2024, Vicebio raised $100 million to advance the development of vaccines designed to prevent multiple diseases in a single shot, including respiratory syncytial virus and human metapneumovirus. Less than a year later, Vicebio was acquired by Sanofi for $1.15 billion upfront . As for later-stage investments, Medicxi is interested in opportunities to reposition existing assets or improve the quality of medical outcomes, Mariggi said. An example of this is cardiometabolic biotech Versanis Bio, for which Medicxi co-led a $70 million Series A raise in 2021. Versanis’ lead asset, bimagrumab, is a monoclonal antibody that targets certain activin receptors to reduce body fat while preserving muscle. Eli Lilly bought Versanis for up to almost $2 billion in cash in 2023. “We felt a few years ago that obesity was going to become a major disease area of focus and the data on GLP-1s was already there and available,” Mariggi said. “I think we saw in the Versanis assets something that was going to bring differentiation, which is not more weight loss, but really starting to work on the quality of the weight loss.” Medicxi previously raised $400 million for its Medicxi IV fund in 2023. The firm was created in 2016 by the former Index Ventures life sciences team.