The advent of new biologic medicines in the past 25 years has been transformational, introducing powerful new treatments for a range of autoimmune disorders. But these drugs don’t help all patients and some who do respond find they need greater efficacy. Most of those biologics are monoclonal antibodies engineered to hit a single target. Startup Dualitas Therapeutics aims to achieve better outcomes by hitting two targets with a single drug.
Dualitas’s research has yielded two bispecific antibodies that are its lead programs, both in preclinical development for prevalent immunological conditions. The South San Francisco-based startup also has an emerging pipeline based on discoveries from its platform technology. As Dualitas continues to make progress, the startup launched from stealth this week, backed by a $65 million financing that includes participation from two big pharmaceutical companies, both of which have made major investments in immunology.
Antibodies that hit two targets with a single drug first reached patients as cancer treatments. A newer class of bispecific antibodies has become a hot area of research for the potential to form a backbone for cancer drug combinations. In oncology, bispecific drugs are designed to hit one target on a cancer cell and another target on an immune cell. Dualitas’s bispecifics hit two targets on the same immune cell. The company’s scientists believe taking this approach to autoimmune disease offers the potential to achieve things traditional monoclonal antibodies cannot.
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“We’re seeing activity that you can’t find from just individual monoclonal antibodies, really proving out the premise that bispecifics are able to open up new activities and new spaces and potentially greater benefit for patients that single antibodies themselves can’t do,” said co-founder Forbes Huang.
Huang, who is Dualitas’s chief operating officer and chief business officer, brings experience that includes senior roles at Gyroscope Therapeutics and Iveric Bio. The startup’s other co-founder is Chief Scientific Officer Greg Lazar, who oversaw antibody engineering teams at Genentech and over the course of his career invented many foundational bispecific antibody technologies. Huang said the medical field knows what bispecifics can do in oncology. He and Lazar aimed to develop a way to bring this modality to autoimmune diseases.
The foundation of Dualitas is an internally developed platform technology that screens the surfaceome — the entire surface of a cell — to find promising combinations of targets that together provide the desired effect. This technology, named DualScreen, screens hundreds of thousands of bispecific combinations to find the ones that are promising to drug.
Rich Murray, interim CEO and board member of Dualitas, said DualScreen leverages what’s called proximity biology — the interplay between mechanisms when they are close together. This approach is already used by bispecifics for cancer. For example, a T-cell engager works by binding to the immune cell and cancer cell simultaneously, bringing them together so the immune cell can kill the cancer cell. Dualitas uses its technology to find unsuspected or unplanned activities that occur when two different targets on the same cell are brought together at the cell’s surface. This interaction is mediated by a bispecific antibody.
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“We’re big supporters of bispecifics in general, but the ones we’re after are unique and rely upon that proximity biology to really increase potency, depth of response, [and] extend the pharmacology,” Murray said. “In our lead programs, we see that evidence in preclinical models.”
The lead programs are DTX-103 for allergic diseases, the first one being asthma, and DTX-102, a potential autoimmune disease drug with an initial focus on rheumatoid arthritis. Specific targets for both drugs remain undisclosed, but preclinical tests with approved immunology therapies as a benchmark show “very compelling pharmacology,” Huang said.
Dualitas plans to keep one of those programs to develop internally and seek a partner for the other one. Partnerships could also include alliances in which Dualitas does screening and hands over a drug candidate that a larger company advances through development and potential commercialization.
With the new financing, Dualitas will work toward advancing a lead internal program toward the clinic over the next 18 to 24 months, Murray said. The key for that program as well as other programs that follow will be to show differentiation from standard of care. This differentiation will guide the clinical trial strategy, Murray said.
Dualitas formed in 2023 with seed funding from SV Health Investors. The new capital, a Series A round, was co-led by Versant Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners USA. Other participants in the round include SV Health Investors and new strategic investors Chugai Venture Fund, Eli Lilly & Co., and Alexandria Venture Investments.
Huang said Dualitas (pronounced “doo-AHL-ee-tahs”) is often misspoken, even by some of the company’s own board members. One common mispronunciation sounds like the name of singer Dua Lipa, he said. The startup takes its name from the Latin word “dualitas,” which means duality or being twofold in nature.
“As we think about bispecifics and really needing two aspects to create a medicine that now has the potential to be greater than the sum of the parts, that’s how we aligned on the name Dualitas,” Huang said.
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