If you could package many of the major storylines of biotech’s past few years into one company, it would look like Candid Therapeutics.
The San Diego biotech is going all-in on autoimmune diseases, one of the hottest therapeutic areas. As a modality, it has bet on T cell engagers, which has caught a flurry of pharma interest. And it’s part of the megaround trend, with a $370 million funding round that’s one of the industry’s biggest.
And it got there by following one of the hottest strategies in biopharma dealmaking: licensing assets from Chinese biotechs several times in its less than two-year history.
It’s led by founder and CEO Ken Song, the industry veteran who took radiopharmaceuticals startup RayzeBio from IPO to a
$4.1 billion M&A exit
in the
span of 90 days
in 2023. And most of the biggest names in biopharma investing are also in the mix. The company still has about another two and a half years of runway, chief financial and business officer Arvind Kush said.
“The opportunity is enormous, right up there in surpassing some of the major successes in this field, like TNF inhibitors like Humira,” said Aaron Royston, managing partner at Candid investor venBio.
Candid is already in the clinic with multiple T cell engagers that it’s exploring for five indications: IgA nephropathy, myasthenia gravis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus and systemic sclerosis. More indications will be disclosed by year’s end, Song said.
“Anyone who knows Ken Song knows that guy can just hustle, move fast. He builds phenomenal teams who just make it happen,” Candid board member Angie You said.
You and Royston both acknowledged that T cell engagers and autoimmune drug development are competitive and crowded. But that doesn’t bother Song.
“We’ve got 15-20 shots on goal, and we just got to make one of them score,” Song said.
During pitches to investors, Song would describe Candid as the company that is “going to prove or disprove, for the entire industry, T cell engagers for autoimmune diseases.”
Since the September 2024 launch, Candid has seen data from academics and others in the field that have already boosted their confidence in the TCE approach.
“We have a fairly high level of conviction that T cell engagers actually can accomplish the same depth of depletion and efficacy as autologous CAR-T therapy,” Song said. “I don’t think that’s widely appreciated yet by the field.”
The 40-employee Candid has partners like EpimAb, Genor Biopharma and WuXi Biologics to thank for their early work in creating assets, and discovery collaborators like Nona Biosciences and Ab Studio who are helping pad out the rest of the pipeline.
“Oftentimes, molecular development in China is viewed as potential headwinds for the US because there’s a lot of competition. On the flip side, it’s also a novel sourcing channel to build US companies these days,” Royston said.
Candid set up its own China operation this year. Almost a dozen employees work there. By having Candid employees in China, led by a US team, the expectation is that the “data will be viewed with a lot of credibility and validity,” Royston said.
The “initial assumption” was that Candid would take its first two T Cell engagers, which had Chinese clinical data in oncology patients, to the FDA to request approval for clinical testing in autoimmune patients, Song said.
But conflicting views between departments at the FDA have made early clinical development in the US unappealing. The company has gone to China, Europe, New Zealand and Australia to move faster. Development in China also costs about one-fifth or one-sixth less than the US, Royston said.
“You could not see more misalignment between CBER and CDER as it relates to the oversight of development of deep B cell depletion therapies,” Song said.
The Candid CEO said the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research has been flexible on cell therapies that are “more dangerous and also more costly and more cumbersome to the healthcare system.” The Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, meanwhile, has not paved a similar “streamlined” path for B cell-depleting therapies, Song said. CBER is allowing for “rapid development,” while CDER is “putting in lots of obstacles,” he added.
“You might as well just be working with two completely different agencies, because they’re not talking to each other and there’s no consistency,” Song said.
As the FDA figures itself out, Candid will be barreling ahead on its own.
“We’ve been very vocal, we’ve spoken with strategics and said, ‘Look, this is a race, and I believe we’re going to run it fastest by just being alone,’” Song said.