An 18-month-old Florida biotech has raised a $50 million Series A to wade into the hot immunology and inflammation (I&I) field with oral small molecules.
Forward Therapeutics unveiled the financing from BVF Partners, RA Capital Management and OrbiMed on Wednesday morning. The startup will use the funds to gather Phase I data within three years for its lead drug candidate, CEO Toufike Kanouni told Endpoints News.
While many of the I&I medicines to date have been biologics (think AbbVie’s megablockbuster Humira), Forward wants to create oral small molecules, which are easier to deliver and hopefully come with fewer side effects.
Big Pharmas have bet on the oral small molecule approach in the past year. Eli Lilly doled out $2.4 billion in cash for DICE Therapeutics, which is in the burgeoning IL-17 field, and Takeda splashed $4 billion upfront for Nimbus Therapeutics’ clinical-stage capsule going after TYK2.
Kanouni said those two targets — TYK2 and IL-17 — can have “niche applications,” and more treatments are needed to address other patients. On Monday, Ventyx Biosciences said it would stop developing its oral TYK2 drug for psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis in the wake of disappointing data.
“We are thinking on how to best position our molecules going forward,” the CEO added.
Kanouni declined to disclose which targets Forward has selected other than saying they’re “well-validated.” The co-founder noted the startup will share more next year.
The company aims to hire a chief medical officer in the first half of next year to help it determine whether to go into a dermatology, rheumatology or gastroenterology indication first, the CEO said. Kanouni created Forward with chief scientific officer Ewan Taylor, who he met while the two worked at Takeda in the late 2000s. Taylor stayed there until the spring of 2022, while Kanouni went on to work at Quanticel Pharmaceuticals and then oncology-focused Kinnate Biopharma.
‘David Liu size of shares’
Forward got its start with $8 million in seed money from Curie.Bio, the $520 million venture firm and drug discovery services shop from Alexis Borisy, Zach Weinberg and Christoph Lengauer. It’s the first Curie-seeded biotech to have reached the Series A-stage, with others like Astoria Biologica, Decrypt Biomedicine and Differentiated Therapeutics following in its footsteps.
Christoph LengauerThe VC firm, focused on founder-led biotech startups, aims to dole out about $5 million to $7 million for about a 33% stake, and its drug discovery accelerator takes about a 7% stake in exchange for its services, Weinberg said in February, when Curie.Bio unveiled. About 1,000 founders have approached them so far, Lengauer said, noting he sifts through every single application.
“The founders could do this with only $8 million and still own what we call a David Liu-size of shares of their company,” Lengauer, the chief scientific officer at Curie.Bio, told Endpoints, referring to the famed Harvard researcher who’s co-founded gene editing biotechs like Prime Medicine and Beam Therapeutics. “David can do this because he is who he is. Normal founders can’t. Normal founders own little in their company.”
Lengauer said he hopes Forward’s story of getting to a development candidate with a relatively small check and few staffers can show “there’s another way” to building a biotech company.
“It’s a story of optimism for the ecosystem. Everybody’s like, ‘It’s so tough,’” Lengauer said in an interview. “There’s another way. Two guys and a dog creating a biotech company and being successful and still owning a shitload of it — that should be the new story. I want that story out there while everybody else struggles with their [Series] B or down rounds or raising an A.”
