A British life sciences firm has helped lead an investment in a US biotech startup focused on developing antibody-drug conjugates.
London-based Arix Bioscience said Monday that it had co-led a $58 million Series A financing of San Diego-based VelosBio, investing $11 million and taking a 11.2 percent stake in the company. The other leader was Sofinnova Ventures, while Pappas Ventures and Chiesi Ventures participated, along with existing investors Takeda Ventures and Decheng Capital.
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“Cancer emerges through multiple molecular and cellular pathways and accordingly needs to be tackled with multiple therapeutic tools,” said Joe Anderson, Arix’s chief investment officer, in a statement. “Our strategy in oncology is to support a diverse portfolio of companies using novel and differentiated approaches to treat cancer and improve patient outcomes.”
VelosBio is developing ADCs to treat hematological cancers and solid tumors. Its CEO is Dave Johnson, who was previously CEO of Acerta Pharma, which British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca bought in 2015 for up to $7 billion. Acerta developed the drug Calquence (acalabrutinib), a Bruton tyrosine kinase inhibitor that the Food and Drug Administration last year granted accelerated approval for mantle cell lymphoma and is a competitor to AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s Imbruvica (ibrutinib), also a BTK inhibitor.
ADCs are drugs that consist of a cytotoxic compound conjugated via a biochemical linker to a monoclonal antibody that targets an antigen on the surface of a cancer cell and then directly delivers the cytotoxic compound.
Though the Arix press release referred to ADCs as a “new class of highly potent drugs,” Seattle Genetics has marketed one, Adcetris (brentuximab vedotin), since 2011, for Hodgkin’s lymphoma and T-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas. Another ADC, Pfizer’s Mylotarg (gemtuzumab ozogamicin), was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 for acute myeloid leukemia before being pulled from the market in 2010 over toxicity concerns. However, the FDA granted Mylotarg approval again last year when subsequent testing showed the toxicities were not as serious as initially thought. Seattle Genetics has several additional ADCs in development, most of which have the same cytotoxic compound as Adcetris, which comprises the company’s only marketed product.
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A related drug class consists of antibodies with conjugated radioisotopes, such as those that New York-based Actinium Pharmaceuticals is developing.
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