A company focused on developing genetically targeted drugs discovered by academia and then building subsidiary companies around them has raised nearly $300 million in a financing round.
Palo Alto, California-based BridgeBio Pharma said Wednesday it had raised $299.2 million in a round backed by KKR, Perceptive Advisors, Viking Venture, AIG, Aisling Capital, Cormorant Capital, Sequoia Capital and Hercules Capital. New investors included Sequoia and also an unnamed “blue-chip, long-term investor,” the company said. BridgeBio’s last funding round was a $135 million Series C, raised in September 2017.
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The company plans to use the money support and expand upon existing research and development programs in genetic diseases. BridgeBio’s practice is to find product candidates, sourced from various academic and research institutions and companies, and then launch subsidiary companies to develop them. The company was founded in 2015, and its business model was developed in conjunction with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.
One recent example of a company established by BridgeBio is QED Therapeutics, which it launched in January 2018. It first in-licensed a drug from Novartis, infigratinib, an inhibitor of the kinase receptor FGFR. It then launched QED to drive the drug’s development, with an initial financial commitment of $65 million. The drug is in Phase II development for patients with cholangiocarcinoma, or bile duct cancer, that is refractory to chemotherapy and contains FGFR2 fusions.
More recently, in November, another BridgeBio company, Eidos Therapeutics, announced positive results from a Phase II study of the drug AG10 in transthyretin amyloidosis cardiomyopathy, also known as ATTR-CM, which it presented at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting. A rare and fatal genetic cardiovascular disease, ATTR comes in wild-type, mutant and polyneuropathy forms that globally affect 400,000, 40,000 and 10,000 people worldwide, respectively. Eidos is publicly traded on the Nasdaq, having listed in June 2018.
Other companies in BridgeBio’s portfolio include PellePharm, Origin Biosciences, Phoenix Tissue Repair, Navire Pharma, CoA Therapeutics, Venthera, Aspa Therapeutics, Fortify Therapeutics and several undisclosed companies. Most are focused on genetic diseases, along with some that are focused on cancers.
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