Massachusetts' Deciphera Banks $52 Million to Advance Oncology Pipeline
June 1, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
WALTHAM, Mass. – As Deciphera Pharmaceuticals looks to present Phase I data DCC-2618, the company’s pan-KIT and PDGFRa inhibitor at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the company announced it secured $52 million to advance its oncology pipeline.
The latest financing round, which was led by Viking Global Investors LP, Redmile Group, and Sphera Global Healthcare Fund, will be used to carry Deciphera’s novel oncology products into mid-stage clinical development. Michael Taylor, president and chief executive officer of Deciphera, said the funding will be used to develop and advance DCC-2618 and DCC-3014 with a goal of “delivering new therapies that address key resistance mechanisms to improve cancer treatment outcomes.”
DCC-2618, which is being shown off in poster presentation at ASCO later this week, is a pan-KIT and PDGFRa kinase switch control inhibitor in clinical development for the treatment of KIT and/or PDGFRa-driven cancers, including gastrointestinal stromal tumors, glioblastoma multiforme and systemic mastocytosis. Although the data has yet to be presented, earlier this month Oliver Rosen, Deciphera’s chief medical officer, said the data confirms earlier results presented at the 2016 EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics.
At the April conference, the company presented data showing DCC-2618 at two dosing levels “resulted in dramatic reductions or complete clearance from their plasma of cell free (cf) DNA across the spectrum of exons 9, 11, 13, 14, 17 and 18 KIT mutations,” the company said at the time. Dosing levels were at 30 mg and 50 mg.
“By inhibiting even difficult to treat secondary drug resistant KIT mutations, such as exon 13 V654A, DCC-2618 offers the potential for more durable responses in patients where mutations confer resistance to other kinase inhibitor therapies,” Taylor said in a statement at the time.
In preclinical models, DCC-3014 demonstrated potent inhibition of the colony stimulating factor 1 receptor (CSF1R), an important target for the treatment of many cancer indications. DCC-3014, now in Phase I development, was purposefully designed using the company’s proprietary switch control inhibitor platform to be a highly-specific macrophage immunomodulatory agent. Last year, Deciphera reported preclinical data demonstrating potent macrophage checkpoint inhibition with DCC-3014 in multiple cancer models both as a single agent and in combination with a PD-1 inhibitor.
In addition to the three new VCs supporting Deciphera’s Series C financing, the company continues to be supported by existing investors that include New Leaf Venture Partners.