A startup planning to enter a blood cancer drug into late-stage clinical development next year has raised more than $150 million in a private financing.
San Mateo, California-based Kronos Bio said Monday that it had raised the $155 million financing of convertible notes, with $148 million raised to date and the remaining $ 7 million to be funded by the middle of next month, pursuant to binding commitments.
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Perceptive Advisors led the financing, which included funds managed by, affiliated or otherwise associated with with BlackRock, Casdin Partners, Commodore Capital, EcoR1 Capital, Fidelity Management and Research Company, Surveyor Capital, T. Rowe Price Associates, Woodline Partners and others, including an unnamed large asset manager on the West Coast. Existing investors that also participated include GV, Invus, Nextech Invest, Omega Funds, Polaris Partners and Vida Ventures. The company raised $105 million in a Series A round last year.
“Importantly, this capital will help advance our lead [SYK] inhibitor, which we recently acquired from [Gilead Sciences], including potentially into a registrational trial in 2021,” Kronos CEO Norbert Bischofberger said in a statement. “It will also help us advance our second lead pipeline candidate, KB-0742, a differentiated CDK9 inhibitor, into a Phase I/II clinical trial for treatment of MYC-amplified solid tumors, as well as to further invest in our product discovery engine to drive multiple oncology programs targeting dysregulated transcription factors.”
According to the company’s pipeline page, the SYK inhibitor, called entospletinib, is in Phase I/II development for acute myeloid leukemia driven by a particular biomarker – overexpression of the HOXA9 and MEIS1 transcription factors – with plans to initiate Phase II/III studies next year. Dysregulation of HOXA9 and MEIS1 happens due to recurring mutations that occur in up to one-half of AML patients.
Kronos and Foster City, California-based Gilead agreed to the purchase of the latter company’s SYK inhibitor portfolio in July for an undisclosed upfront cash payment and note convertible into Kronos equity, along with regulatory and commercial milestone payments and royalties. In addition to entospletinib, which showed signs of efficacy in a poster presented at the 2018 European Hematology Association meeting, the deal included an additional clinical-stage SYK inhibitor, lanraplenib, which has been investigated in autoimmune diseases. Bischofberger had previously worked for Gilead.
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