Fundraising of the Year: Bluefield Innovations

The pioneering medical research that has been carried out at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore since the 19th century was given a significant financial boost in November 2017 when a new partnership with New York-based investment firm Deerfield Management was announced. 

The fruit of this collaboration – the $65m Bluefield Innovations commercialisation fund – has been set up at least partly to address the decline in government funding for scientific research.

Bluefield will finance early-stage therapeutic research projects at the university over the next five years with the aim of licensing the most viable ideas to third parties or spinning them out. The projects that Bluefield supports through the various stages of pre-clinical development will be identified by a joint steering committee.

“For more than 125 years, Johns Hopkins has been at the forefront of research and medical innovation,” said Ronald Daniels, the university’s president. “As we expand this tradition, collaborations with industry will help us more efficiently move groundbreaking technologies to market.

“Our relationship with Deerfield will provide a fully-funded and professionally supported avenue for Johns Hopkins researchers to deliver on the potential of their promising work.”

Deerfield has a long record of supporting ventures both at Johns Hopkins and in the wider medical research community. In June 2016, for example, the firm led a $45m series B funding round for Blade Therapeutics, a fibrosis-treatment specialist which was spun out of Johns Hopkins in 2015. And in October last year, Deerfield committed $50m to funding research at the Broad Institute, which is a collaboration between Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

James Flynn, managing partner at Deerfield Management, said: “We are proud and excited to be collaborating with Johns Hopkins, a premier institution with world-class scientists dedicated to pushing the boundaries of discovery to transform health care. Further, the development expertise and scientific leadership resident at Johns Hopkins drug discovery program is a tremendous asset in enabling Bluefield to move the innovations of Hopkins’ scientists forward toward their therapeutic applications.”

At the start of this year, Bluefield announced its first funding project, research that is looking at how cancer cells use the cellular pathway provided by the enzyme RNA polymerase I and how this can be disrupted. The pathway is thought to be integral to cancer cells but relatively immaterial to healthy ones.

The project originated in the lab of Marikki Laiho, the Willard and Lillian Hackerman professor of radiation oncology and director of the division of molecular radiation sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

According to the institution, Bluefield will provide scientific, financial and operational support to Laiho and her team.

Laiho said: “I truly appreciate the opportunity to align with a collaborator that shares the same mindset and goals surrounding early-stage research targets. Bluefield understands that new targets and first-in-class molecules require a higher level of due diligence and with that, they provide the expertise to support the extensive ground work required for the investigational new drug process.”