Endeavor pulls in $132M to back cancer, lung disease drugs

2024-04-24

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上市批准临床2期并购临床结果抗体药物偶联物

Endeavor BioMedicines has raised $132.5 million in a Series C round designed to advance its two experimental medicines deeper into clinical testing, the San Diego company announced Wednesday.

The round was led by AyurMaya, an affiliate of investment firm Matrix Capital Management. Originally, the company’s financing target was between $75 million and $100 million, according to CEO John Hood. But Endeavor upped its expectations after reaching out to investors late last year.

Hood and his team found strong interest in a biotech with two drugs in early- and mid-stage testing, suggestive of the current investment climate favoring more mature drug startups. The company revealed positive Phase 2 study results in January while putting its funding together.

“We got the luxury of raising on really good clinical data for a disease with high unmet need,” Hood told BioPharma Dive, in an interview.

With Endeavor, Hood is following a similar strategy as the last biotech he founded, Impact Biosciences. He formed that company around a myelofibrosis drug that was licensed from Sanofi. Impact’s progress eventually drew the interest of Celgene, which acquired the company for $7 billion in 2018. The drug, Inrebic, was approved a year later and is now sold by Bristol Myers Squibb.

Endeavor, which launched in 2021, is also developing medicines that originated elsewhere. Its lead program, known as ENV-101, was first discovered by Eli Lilly and changed hands multiple times before arriving at Endeavor. Its second prospect, ENV-501, was licensed last year from Singapore-based startup Hummingbird Bioscience. (A third, that’s no longer in development, was acquired from a pair of academic institutions.)

The two drugs have little in common: ENV-101 is being developed for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, while ENV-501 is a cancer medicine. But Hood views both as potential advances in the diseases they’re targeting. “I'm not going to do this, and my investors aren't interested in doing this, just to have a 'me-too,' or an incremental drug,” he said.

ENV-101, once known as taladegib, blocks a cellular pathway dubbed “hedgehog” that plays an important role in wound healing as well as tumor progression. As with other so-called hedgehog inhibitors, such as Roche’s Erivedge and Novartis’ Odomzo, it was initially developed for a type of skin cancer. But Endeavor has been exploring its use in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a rare disease that causes scarring to build up in the lungs.

Preliminary Phase 2 study results suggested the drug may improve on standard therapies that can only slow the decline of lung function. The company will use the new funds to test that theory further. It’s planning a Phase 2b study in IPF, as well as progressive pulmonary fibrosis, later this year.

ENV-501, meanwhile, is a type of targeted cancer medicine known as an antibody-drug conjugate, or ADC, which fuses an antibody to a tumor-killing toxin. Endeavor is testing it against cancers expressing the protein HER3.

ENV-501 trails more advanced HER3-targeting ADCs, most notably a therapy from AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo that’s under regulatory review. But it claims ENV-501 may be safer and more potent because of certain features, such as a particular “linker” molecule meant to more precisely deliver the drug to tumors, according to Hood.

Endeavor plans to start an early-stage trial in solid tumors this year.

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