Startups, Pharma

Versant launches Black Diamond Therapeutics with $20M to pursue untapped cancer mutations

The company plans to file an IND for its allosteric HER2-targeting drug at the end of 2019, followed by one for its second product candidate in the first half of 2020.

A healthcare investment firm has launched a new company focused on developing drugs that target allosteric cancer mutations, which have thus far seen little in the way of drug development compared with the traditional kinase domain mutations.

San Francisco-based Versant Ventures said Tuesday that it launched Black Diamond Therapeutics, which is coming out of stealth mode with a $20 million Series A funding round provided exclusively by the investment firm. The company was launched out of Versant’s Basel, Switzerland-based discovery engine, Ridgeline.

While in stealth mode, Versant said, Black Diamond built and established proof of concept for its MAP platform, whose name stands for mutation, allostery and pharmacology. The platform is designed to find and target allosteric mutant oncogenes. Oncogenes are activated by kinase domain mutations or by allosteric mutations. The company described allosteric mutations as “an undrugged and unexplored space” compared with kinase mutations, for which numerous drugs have been approved.

To be sure, many approved small-molecule drugs in oncology are allosteric inhibitors. However, CEO David Epstein and Chief Scientific Officer Alex Mayweg explained in a phone interview that despite the similar nomenclature, targeting allosteric mutations is a different and novel approach. “It’s true that there’s quite a bit of activity in trying to find allosteric drugs,” said Mayweg, who is also a partner at Versant. “We’re not talking about allosteric drugs, but certain oncogenic proteins that are activated and become oncogenic because they have mutations outside the traditional drug sites.”

The two most advanced product candidates in Black Diamond’s pipeline are inhibitors of allosteric HER2 and allosteric EGFR. HER2 is commonly expressed in breast cancers, while EGFR is common in lung cancers. But by default, Epstein said, allosteric mutations are resistant to earlier kinase inhibitors and even some monoclonal antibodies. “We can drug them selectively and in so doing develop a whole new class of molecules with a novel intellectual property landscape,” he said.

Epstein and company co-founder Elizabeth Buck both worked at OSI Pharmaceuticals – later acquired by Japanese drugmaker Astellas Pharma – where their work included the development of Tarceva (erlotinib), a kinase inhibitor of EGFR approved for non-small cell lung cancer and pancreatic cancer.

The company’s plan is to file an Investigational New Drug application to start clinical development of the allosteric HER2 inhibitor at the end of 2019, followed by an IND for the EGFR inhibitor in the first half of 2020, Epstein said.

Photo: Getty Images

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