Aladorian

A 20-year-old biotech working on small molecule treatments for cardiovascular and skeletal muscle diseases has rebranded and plans to enter Phase 2 in heart failure later this year. Formerly known as ARMGO Pharma, the Boston biotech will move forward as RyCarma Therapeutics, the Forbion-backed company told Endpoints News . Advancing the nimble biotech are CEO Adam Rosenberg, and president and chief strategy officer Jonathan Alspaugh. Rosenberg was previously CEO of Aliada Therapeutics, a neuroscience biotech recently bought by AbbVie for $1.4 billion, and is chair of VectorY Therapeutics , Seamless Therapeutics and Ambagon Therapeutics . Alspaugh was previously president of Aeglea , which is now Spyre. ARMGO was formed in 2004 based on research conducted by Columbia University professor Andrew Marks, who’s worked for decades in the cardiovascular space. The biotech builds off Marks’ work in the field of ryanodine receptors. “When we’ve spoken to cardiologists about the mechanism here, they actually get really excited because of how easy it is to actually articulate,” Alspaugh said in an interview. The company’s small molecules are allosteric modulators of the ryanodine receptor. “The receptors are leaky due to cellular stress or genetic aberrations, and this stabilizes the channel and allows it to return to normal function,” he said. “This, in contrast to something like SGLT2 inhibitors — which are amazing drugs for heart failure patients, [but] cardiologists still don’t fully understand how they work.” The goal is to get ARM210 into a Phase 2 trial at the end of this year that tests the drug in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, according to Alspaugh. The exact details of the trial are still being ironed out, Rosenberg said in the same interview. The biotech is also testing ARM210 in patients with ryanodine receptor 1-related myopathies, which are rare neuromuscular diseases. Rosenberg said his father, a doctor himself, has hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. “I’m unfortunately quite aware of the impact of cardiovascular disease,” he said. “When heart failure patients present, they don’t typically come in and say, ‘My heart is weak.’ They say, ‘I am weak.'” Alspaugh said the company is hopeful that ARM210 can help with weakness on multiple fronts. “This would be the first mechanism that could actually address impairments of the cardiac muscle and the skeletal muscle,” he added. RyCarma had a 14-year partnership with Servier. The companies eventually took an experimental medicine into multiple Phase 2 clinical trials, but the European pharma ended the collaboration a few years ago, Rosenberg said. Though it’s been around for two decades, RyCarma has raised only about $50 million to date, mainly from Forbion, Pontifax and Kurma Partners, said Rosenberg, who added that the biotech employs fewer than 10 people and has been capital-efficient. It also helped that Servier covered direct costs, supported research and funded three Phase 2 trials with the prior molecule, dubbed ARM036, according to Rosenberg. RyCarma recently did a bridge financing of about $12.5 million from its Series B investors, Alspaugh said. That will back the biotech “through this year,” he said. The rebrand includes “arm” as a nod to its original name. Those are the initials of Marks, the scientific founder.