A Chinese startup has become the latest to raise a triple-digit sum in its first major venture capital fundraising from US as well as Asian backers.
Alphamab Oncology – based in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, near Shanghai – said Friday that it had raised $100 million in a Series A funding round. New York-based OrbiMed participated in the round, along with California-based managed care organization Heritage Provider Network. Others included several Asian firms, including PAG, Advantech Capital, China Venture Capital Fund and Janchor Partners.
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The company will devote the money to global clinical development of its pipeline, which includes four drugs currently in clinical development. These include KN035 (envafolimab), a subcutaneous monoclonal antibody that targets PD-L1 and is in registration-directed studies in China. In the US, the market for drugs that inhibit PD-1 and PD-L1 is already crowded, including Merck & Co.’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab), Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Opdivo (nivolumab), Roche’s Tecentriq (atezolizumab), Pfizer and Merck KGaA’s Bavencio (avelumab) and AstraZeneca’s Imfinzi (durvalumab). However, all of those drugs are administered intravenously, rather than via the more convenient subcutaneous injection. The Chinese Clinical Trial Registry lists one Phase II study of KN035.
Alphamab is also developing KN046, a bispecific antibody that targets PD-L1 and CTLA-4, currently in a Phase I study in Australia and plans for Phase I/II development in China and “BLA enabling” trials – which would be for US registration – also in the works. The closest thing to such a therapy on the market currently is the combination of Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Opdivo, which targets PD-1, and Yervoy (ipilimumab), which targets CTLA-4. Last week, however, a Phase III study that combined AstraZeneca’s Imfinzi with its own CTLA-4 inhibitor, tremelimumab, failed in first-line non-small cell lung cancer, with a hazard ratio indicating that the combination performed even worse than Imfinzi by itself.
Other drugs in the firm’s pipeline include KN-26, a HER2-targeting bispecific antibody that is in a Phase I study in China and will enter a Phase I trial in the US thanks to a recent Investigational New Drug application approval by the Food and Drug Administration. KN019, meanwhile, is an immunomodulator expected to enter Phase II development in the first half of next year.
Other companies have also recently raised large Series A rounds. Allogene, for example, went public last month, just a few months after raising $300 million in its Series A, followed by a $120 million. Indeed, a report in July by Silicon Valley Bank found that biopharma Series A rounds in first half of 2018 alone exceeded the aggregate amount for all of 2017, hitting $2.6 billion, compared with $2.3 billion last year.
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