Just 10 months after closing the second tranche of a $42 million financing round, a biopharma developing a class of drugs called stapled peptides has collected another $30 million to advance a cancer drug candidate to the clinic.
Aileron Therapeutics says all of its existing investors participated in the $30 million Series E, including Apple Tree Partners, Roche Venture Fund, Novartis Venture Funds, Lilly Ventures, SR One and Excel Venture Management. The new round brings Aileron’s total raised to just under $100 million.
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The company’s lead candidate, ALRN-5281, is a long-acting growth-hormone-releasing factor agonist that it’s developing for treatment of orphan endocrine disorders including adult growth hormone deficiency and HIV-associated lipodystrophy. The first Phase 1 trial was completed in May.
What seems to really have gotten investors excited, though, is an oncology drug candidate Aileron originally developed in a partnership with Roche and has recently acquired the rights to. ALRN-6924 targets the gene p53, a tumor suppressor gene that’s shown to be inactivated in most human cancers. The drug is designed to reactivate the gene by binding to and inhibiting two proteins, MDM2 and MDMX, that circumvent p53’s defensive mechanisms. Aileron says it will advance the drug into Phase 1 trials next year in patients with liquid and solid tumors.
At the core of Aileron’s technology is a technique called peptide “stapling,” to stabilize peptides and lock them into an optimal shape for cross-linking. The Cambridge-based company was founded in 2005 with technology from Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.