BioPharma

A VC’s take on the $1.3 billion acquisition of CinCor Pharma by AstraZeneca

Maina Bhaman, a board member of CinCor Pharma reflects on the news from Monday that AstraZeneca is acquiring the Massachusetts startup to bring another option for patients with resistant hypertension.

U.K. biopharma company AstraZeneca announced its plans Monday to buy Massachusetts startup CinCor for $1.3 billion and bring its lead drug candidate — a hyperintensive drug — to market. If the startup succeeds in developing the drug and submitting it for regulatory review they stand to get another $500 million.

In an interview in San Francisco during the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference, a CinCor board member said that the company is bringing a significant innovation to the world of hypertension that hasn’t seen new drugs in a while.

“This is one of the first cardiovascular drugs or hypertension drugs that have been developed in quite a long time,” said Maina Bhaman, partner of Sofinnova Partners. “So there hasn’t been a huge amount of competition in the hypertension space.”

As MedCity News’ Frank Vinluan wrote about the deal on Monday, CinCor’s small molecule is “designed to block an enzyme key to the synthesis of aldosterone, a blood-pressure regulating hormone.”

But CinCor’s drug will not be a first line of therapy given that doctors typically prescribe beta blockers who develop high blood pressure, Bhaman said. But let’s say even with a beta blocker and calcium channel blocker, and perhaps even a diuretic, your high blood pressure is stubbornly high. Then you would be a candidate for the drug that CinCor is hoping to commercialize in a few years, Bhaman said.

She added that the drug has shown a good safety profile and is expected to launch a Phase 3 trial in the first half of this year.

“There are a couple of other people developing drugs at the moment that have, similar mechanism. We think we have best in class and hopefully that first in class to get to patients. And, you know, the data was fantastic,” Bhaman said. “We got a New England Journal of Medicine paper from it.”

CinCor’s Phase 2 study of the drug baxdrostat actually missed its primary endpoint of reducing blood pressure in patients with uncontrolled hypertension. Bhaman was likely referring to results in a patient subgroup that showed double-digit declines. That subgroup accounted for 47% of trial participants.

Clearly that was something that caught the eye of AstraZeneca’s corporate business development, which scooped up the biotech.

“AstraZeneca will be a great partner for the drug,” Bhaman said. “They have a strong interest in the area, and we think that they’ll be able to bring it to a lot more patients faster than we could.”

In fact, AstraZeneca is hoping that CinCor’s drug will be able to address more than just resitant hypertension. They also hope to address chronic kidney disease and coronary artery disease.

The drug, which is meant to be ad add-on for patients already on multiple blood pressure medication, is not the only effort going on in the medical world for patients struggling with the problem of drug-resistant hypertension. The medical device world has sought to leverage a minimally surgical procedure and ablate the the renal artery to lower blood pressure for years but no winner is yet to emerge with a successful therapy.

Medtronic’s renal denervation system has failed to achieve goals in two different trials but even despite the latest failure, the company moved forward with a submission to the Food and Drug Administration last year. Two other companies also in the renal denervation therapy area and SoniVie — which has received the breakthrough device designation from the FDA and a nod from the agency to commence a trial – and ReCor Medical, which submitted its Paradise Ultrasound Renal Denervation system for FDA approval in November.

Photo: maxsattana, Getty Images

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