Startups, Pharma

Enlibrium gets $15M to use metformin analogs for cancer

Enlibrium's technology, licensed out of UCLA, will use diabetes drug metformin to shut down energy production in cancer cells - providing a potentially new frontline treatment for the disease.

Metformin is being viewed these days as something of a miracle drug: The long-used Type 2 diabetes medication is being widely touted for its potential use as an anti-aging agent but, perhaps more importantly, it’s being harnessed as a new frontline therapy for cancer.

To that end, San Diego-based Enlibrium has just launched with technology from UCLA – and $15 million from a syndicate of investors.

The startup is banking on metformin’s ability to shut down cancer energy production – and is developing a number of analogs to the drug to treat a range of cancer types.

“I strongly believe there are opportunities where this could be a first in line treatment, or a standalone treatment,” CEO David Campbell said in a phone interview.

He projects, based on a decade’s worth of literature, that Enlibrium’s metformin analogs could be used in tandem with drugs like Avastin and Paclitaxel – because it works on an alternative pathway than these drugs. One reason for optimism, he says, is that metformin has an innumerably better safety profile than many oncology drugs.

At present, the company’s looking at certain breast, lung and some hematological cancers as early targets – with pancreatic cancer being another option.

The funding will help Enlibrium bring these drugs through Phase 1 proof of concept trials. Campbell says he’s estimating they’ll be ready for early clinical trials in the next 18 to 24 months, if the compounds developed at UCLA go straight to trials without much tweaking.

The reason UCLA researchers – and Enlibrium – are looking for metformin analogs is because while the drug reduces energy, or ATP, production in some cells, it’s a very small subset. Only the cancers that express certain transporters are able to allow metformin to enter the cells and do the work. By engineering similar molecules that can enter a wider range of cancers, the drug and its analogs can do similar work in a range of cancers, Campbell said.

The company’s studying genetic predictors for which cancers would respond to reducing ATP production with metformin.

Enlibrium will be housed in Avalon Ventures’ COI Pharmaceuticals incubator for its biotech portfolio companies. Other investors include TPG Biotech, Correlation Ventures and Osage University Partners.

The underlying technology comes from UCLA researchers Dr. Michael Jung and Dr. Richard Pietras. Notably, Jung helped develop prostate cancer drugs Xtandi at Astellas and Medivation, and ARN-509 from Aragon Pharmaceuticals, which recently was acquired by Johnson & Johnson.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Nottingham Vets]

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