Reunited and It Feels So Good: After the Success of XO1, Serial Biotech Duo Launches SuperX
February 9, 2017
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Same Folks Who Launched Hemophilia Company XO1 Now Launch SuperX with $11 Million
Cambridge, UK – SuperX Ltd. announced that it has completed an $11 million Series A financing. The round was led by Medicxi. Johnson & Johnson Innovation –JJDC also participated.
The same management team that founded XO1 Ltd., which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies in March 2015 is behind SuperX. SuperX was founded by Trevor Baglin, who will act as chief medical officer. He is joined by David Grainger and Jim Huntington, who were the forces behind XO1.
Huntington will be the company’s chief scientific officer. He is a professor of Molecular Haemostasis at Cambridge University. Grainger is a partner at Medicxi, the life sciences investment company that spun out from Index Ventures in early 2016. Grainger will act as chief executive officer.
Johnson & Johnson Innovation was also involved in the early financing of XO1. There are no options in terms of J&J’s involvement, however. John Carroll, writing for Endpoints News, notes, they “will have a front row seat to see how this new follow-up therapy performs.” Grainger told Carroll, “The whole anticoagulant space is simply enormous, with so many different triggers for thrombosis. We still believe the XO1 drug is a magnificent drug,” but goes on to say there are numerous other forms of thrombosis to work on.
As with XO1, the SuperX’s program came out of clinical observations of patients who were expected to have hemophilia, but didn’t. In XO1, the patient stopped bleeding naturally. The researchers identified the antibody that caused it and synthesized it.
SuperX apparent has a similar history, but is not revealing its target. “The (new) target we haven’t disclosed yet,” Huntington told Carroll, “so it’s impossible to say why we’ve decided on this target. But it’s an incredibly cool story.”
There are hints that the coagulant will be used for chronic use, without problems of bleeding that current therapies have.
“SuperX is taking a novel approach to specifically block the thrombosis that causes heart attacks and strokes, which we hope will deliver the ideal anticoagulant treatment for chronic use,” Huntington said in a statement.
Kevin Johnson, a partner at Medicxi, will act as SuperX’s chairman of the board. “We are delighted,” he said in a statement, “to have another opportunity to back a team with a proven track record in early-stage drug discovery, with a unique vision of how the anticoagulant drug space will develop over the next decade. Their virtual drug development model is a perfect fit with the asset-centric strategy we have championed at Medicxi.”
SuperX will be located at the Babraham Research Campus south of Cambridge, UK. It will operate as virtual biotech company, utilizing a network of out-sourced drug discovery and development providers; in other words, contract research organizations (CROs) that are co-located on the Babraham campus. Grainger said in a statement, “Cambridge today leads the world with the strength-in-depth of high quality out-sourced drug discovery companies, which gives a virtual start-up like SuperX the ability to compete with global pharmaceutical companies at a fraction of the cost.”
Medicxi has been busy. In the last week, the company joined a syndicate including Touchstone and Cambridge Enterprise to fund ApcinteX Limited, another spinout from Huntington and Baglin’s laboratories. ApcinteX also is developing a hemophilia drug. The Series A round for that deal was 14 million pounds.