Cardurion heads crop of sizeable bio financings

While the pace of biotech private rounds seems to have slowed a little of late, this week saw four big financings for Cardurion Pharma, Scorpion Therapeutics, CatalYm, and NGM Bio.

Burlington, Massachusetts-based Cardurion led the quartet with a $260 million Series B for its heart-focused drug pipeline, which features two candidates in phase 2 testing – PDE9 inhibitor CRD-750 for heart failure and CaMKII inhibitor CRD-4730 for rare genetic disease catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT).

CRD-750 is being tested across the spectrum of heart failure – with two phase 2 trials ongoing in patients with reduced ejection fraction and preserved ejection fraction, respectively – and is billed by Cardurion as a first-in-class drug. Along with its trial of CRD-4730 in CPVT, a condition which causes serious cardiac arrhythmias, the company will also use the new funding to explore additional "major" cardiovascular indications for the drug.

The round – which comes after a $300 million Series A in 2021 – was led by Ascenta Capital and supported by Bain Capital, NEA, GV, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Millennium Management, Farallon Capital Management, Invus, Blue Owl Healthcare Opportunities, Delos Capital and Digitalis Ventures.

Scorpion raised $150 million in a third round – co-led by Frazier Life Sciences and Lightspeed Venture Partners – that will be used to a pipeline of small molecule oncology programmes led by STX-478, an allosteric, mutant-selective PI3Kα inhibitor, and a pair of EGFR inhibitors codenamed STX-721 and STX-241.

The Boston, US-based biotech said that its priority at present is to accelerate the development of STX-478, which is in a phase 1/2 trial in patients with locally advanced or metastatic hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer and other solid tumours driven by PI3Kα mutations. The drug is being tested as a monotherapy and in combination with CDK4/6 inhibitors and AstraZeneca's selective oestrogen receptor degrader Faslodex (fulvestrant).

Some of the money will also go towards STX-721 and STX-241, which are in early-stage clinical development and partnered with Pierre Fabre under the terms of a $553 million signed last year.

Turning to Germany, Munich-based CatalYm has raised $150 million in a Series D that will support the late-stage clinical development of visugromab, an anti-GDF-15 antibody which is designed to switch off a key mechanism for resistance to cancer therapies.

CatalYm reported data from the phase 1/2 GDFATHER trial of visugromab at ASCO this year, showing that it was able to improve the efficacy of Bristol-Myers Squibb's PD-1 inhibitor Opdivo (nivolumab) in relapsed/refractory patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), urothelial cancer (UC), or hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The cash injection will be used to fund clinical development of the antibody in earlier lines of treatment, including checkpoint inhibitor-naïve patients and second-line settings.

New investors Canaan Partners and Bioqube Ventures led the round, with Forbion's Growth Opportunities Fund, Omega Funds, Gilde Healthcare, and others participating.

Finally, recently de-listed rare disease specialist NGM Bio has celebrated its transition to private ownership with a $122 million Series A that will fund a pivotal trial of its FGF19 analogue aldafermin in primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), a rare form of liver disease.

The proceeds of the funding round – led by venture capitalist The Column Group (TCG), which bought NGM in April – will also go towards a phase 2 study of NGM120 for hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), a complication of pregnancy that leads to repeated vomiting.

There are no approved therapies for either PSC or HG, according to NGM, which said both trials are scheduled to start before the end of the year. The company has had a series of setbacks in the last couple of years, including a failed trial of aldafermin in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), and after shedding staff and axing R&D programmes has refocused its strategy around these two projects.

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