Peptide drugs, such as the metabolic medicines Mounjaro and Zepbound from Eli Lilly, must be administered as injections. But the biotech industry has been pursuing ways to make peptides into pills, and the oral peptide research of startup Orbis Medicines now has Lilly as a financial backer.
Lilly is one of the investors in Orbis’s €90 million (about $93.4 million) Series A round announced Monday. The preclinical startup has not yet disclosed specific diseases for its drug research. But the Copenhagen-based company says it is focusing on targets that are already validated by blockbuster biologic drugs administered by injection.
Peptides are chains of amino acids. One reason peptides aren’t well suited for oral delivery is that they don’t hold up well in the gut’s digestive environment. Macrocycles, peptides formed into a circular shape, can be made into drugs formulated for oral dosing.
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Macrocyclic drugs are already available. One of the best-known examples is cyclosporine, a immunosuppressive agent used to prevent rejection following an organ transplant. The macrocyclic drug candidates of Bicycle Therapeutics resemble two wheels, a more stable shape it says facilitates the ability to bind to targets and address targets that can’t be drugged by small molecules. Christian Heinis, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is a scientific co-founder of both Bicycle and Orbis. Morten Graugaard Døssing, who was executive chairman of Orbis’s board of directors, told MedCity News last year that Bicycles’ drugs are still relatively large in size, which poses challenges for oral dosing. Orbis’s macrocycles, which it calls nCycles, can be formulated for oral dosing and offer the ability to address targets inside and outside of a cell.
“They are smaller, cell permeable, and we can make them at scale,” Graugaard Døssing said of nCycles. “We see us as being very different from other companies in this space.”
Orbis’s nCycles come from nGen, a technology platform that the company says can synthesize and analyze up to 100,000 distinct synthetic macrocycles in weeks, work that would take months or even years with conventional drug discovery methods. The startup was founded in 2021 by Novo Holdings, based on Heinis’s research.
The new financing for Orbis comes nearly a year after the young company emerged from stealth, revealing €26 million (about $28 million) in seed funding. The latest round of financing was led by New Enterprise Associates. Besides Lilly, other new investors in Oribis include Cormorant, the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark. Founding investors Novo Holdings and Forbion also participated in the financing.
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Along with the financing, Orbis announced the appointment of Graugaard Døssing as its new CEO. He had served as executive chair of Orbis’s board for the past three years.
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