Berkeley's Aduro Biotech Banks $51.4 Million
January 5, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
Bay Area clinical stage cancer therapy company Aduro Biotech is celebrating Monday, after raking in $51.4 million in a Series D funding round from 11 investors including OrbiMed, Franklin Advisers, Foresite Capital Management, Clough Capital Partners, Janus Capital Management and Jennison Associates. Leerink Partners acted as bookrunners on the deal.
Berkeley, Calif.-based Aduro said it will use the investment for to expand its research and clinical development capabilities, as it attempts to roll out its immuno-oncology platform in 2015. The company is best known for its experimental combo of proprietary drugs CRS-207 and GVAX Pancreas, a mix that is attracting investor interest as it goes through ECLIPSE, a 240 patient Phase 2b clinical trial to treat metastatic pancreatic cancer.
The cocktail received a breakthrough therapy designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year, a “golden ticket” which has investors circling around the company as it fast-tracks its drug program.
The startup last received a $55 million Series C round from Morningside Group and Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, bringing its total investment so far to $143.4 million.
Aduro has been focusing on developing a platform of live-attenuated double-deleted Listeria monocytogenes strains (or LADD) that it has engineered to jumpstart an immune response in cancer patients. Its lead drug, CRS-207, works by expressing the tumor-associated antigen mesothelin, which makes it useful for treating mesothelioma and pancreatic, lung, ovarian and gastric cancers.
“2014 was a watershed year for Aduro and this financing demonstrates investor confidence in our future,” said Stephen Isaacs, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Aduro.
Aduro’s other primary candidate is GVAX Pancreas, a drug that is a type of GVAX vaccines produced from human cancer cell lines and created to target T cells as a way to boost cancer immunity. Most of the company’s research is based on cyclic dinucleotides (CDNs), which are naturally occurring molecules that target an immunity regulator, dubbed the STING receptor.
“Our accomplishments during the year, including demonstrating positive results in our pancreatic cancer and mesothelioma programs, receiving Breakthrough Therapy designation from the FDA for the combination of CRS-207 and GVAX Pancreas, and establishing two worldwide collaboration agreements with Johnson and Johnson Innovation (Janssen Biotech Inc.) for the development and commercialization of novel immunotherapies for prostate and lung cancers, have positioned us well to achieve our goal of providing patients with more effective and more tolerable alternatives to treat cancer,” he said. “We look forward to completing enrollment in our Phase 2b ECLIPSE trial in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer and further exploring the broad versatility and applicability of our LADD and CDN technologies in other cancers.”