Israeli biotech raises $57M to go where current BRAF inhibitors can't, with backing from Novartis, SR One - Endpoints News

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For the block­buster po­ten­tial of No­var­tis’ Tafin­lar and Pfiz­er’s Braftovi, all the BRAF in­hibitors on the mar­ket so far on­ly tar­get V600 mu­ta­tions — which ac­counts for rough­ly 50% of pa­tients.

Is­raeli biotech Nov­el­lus now has $57 mil­lion to de­vel­op a drug that they say can help the oth­er 50% who have every­thing else.

The Se­ries C will fund a Phase II tri­al for PLX-8394, a “para­dox break­er” that could block RAF with­out ac­ti­vat­ing MAPK sig­nal­ing. In a Phase I tri­al, a pa­tient with a BRAF fu­sion saw their tu­mor go away af­ter tak­ing the drug, al­low­ing Nov­el­lus to hit the ground run­ning.

Ohad Ham­mer

“At the end of the day, clin­i­cal da­ta trumps every­thing,” Ohad Ham­mer of Pon­tif­ax, which led the round, told End­points News.

Hav­ing No­var­tis, which knows the space “in­side out,” par­tic­i­pate through its ven­ture arm doesn’t hurt, ei­ther. Or­biMed Ad­vi­sors, HBM Health­care In­vest­ments, Welling­ton Man­age­ment, Cor­morant As­set Man­age­ment and SR One, among oth­ers, formed the rest of the well-heeled syn­di­cate.

Nov­el­lus didn’t start out with BRAF in mind. Rather, it’s spent much of the past eight years build­ing and val­i­dat­ing a tech plat­form to an­a­lyze pa­tients’ genomes and, by syn­the­siz­ing their mu­ta­tions in vit­ro, test which com­pounds they might re­spond to.

That changed when Michael Vidne, a for­mer di­rec­tor and chief com­mer­cial of­fi­cer, was pro­mot­ed to CEO in ear­ly 2019.

Michael Vidne

“What we de­cid­ed to do is in­stead of find­ing the right drugs for a spe­cif­ic pa­tient, we said to our­selves, ‘Let’s find the right pa­tients for a spe­cif­ic drug,’” he said.

Shift­ing fo­cus, they quick­ly iden­ti­fied a big gap in the BRAF space and the search took them to Plexxikon, a sub­sidiary of Dai­ichi Sankyo, from which they li­censed PLX-8394 ear­li­er this year.

While Plexxikon had po­si­tioned the drug to tar­get pa­tients who re­lapse af­ter tak­ing cur­rent­ly ap­proved BRAF in­hibitors, Nov­el­lus man­aged to con­vince them — with lots of da­ta from its plat­form — that it has a su­pe­ri­or strat­e­gy.

“It wasn’t easy,” Vidne chuck­led.

But now that he has his first deal and the cash to ex­e­cute his plan with 12 staffers, Nov­el­lus has sev­er­al oth­er li­cens­ing deals lined up in the can­cer space, hit­ting dif­fer­ent genes they’ve an­a­lyzed.

With PLX-8394, Ham­mer not­ed that fu­ture stud­ies will fo­cus on fu­sions, cer­tain BRAF-mu­tat­ed gliomas as well as oth­er niche in­di­ca­tions.

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Israeli biotech raises $57M to go where current BRAF inhibitors can't, with backing from Novartis, SR One - Endpoints News
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