February 10, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Redwood City, Calif.-based ARMO BioSciences, Inc. announced today that it had closed on a $50 million Series C financing round. The round involved all of the company’s existing investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), OrbiMed, DAG Ventures and NanoDimension. New investors include HBM Healthcare Investments, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Celgene Corporation , Industrial Investors Group, and private investment funds advised by Clough Capital Partners L.P.
The company plans to use the funds to advance its lead candidate, AM0010, into the clinic, as well as other produces in its pipeline. AM0010 is being developed to treat advanced solid tumors. Other products in its pipeline include cytokines and an anti-Programmed Cell Death Protein (anti-PD-1) monoclonal antibody checkpoint inhibitor.
“AM0010 primes the tumor environment to become more responsive to immune-mediated therapies,” said Peter Van Vlasselaer, president and chief executive officer of ARMO, in a statement. “In ongoing clinical trials, AM0010 has demonstrated durable clinical responses as a single agent and in combination with standard-of-care chemotherapies or anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibodies in melanoma, lung, renal, pancreatic, colorectal and breast cancers. This financing enables us to move forward and initiate the first of several planned registration-enabling Phase II/III studies.”
ARMO employs 11 people and has three Phase Ib clinical trials ongoing in lung and kidney cancers, and in melanoma. These are studying combination therapies that utilize AM0010 with various checkpoint inhibitors, known as anti-PD-1s. The company also has two studies of AM0010 in combination with traditional chemotherapeutic agents in pancreatic cancer and triple-negative breast cancer.
For the most part, ARMO is focused on immuno-oncology therapeutics. This extremely promising area utilizes drugs that supercharge and program the immune system to attack cancer cells in combination with drugs, such as anti-PD-1, that shut down the cancer cells’ ability to turn off the immune system. It’s been compared to simultaneously hitting the gas while taking off the brake.
AM0010 is a version of the cell-signaling protein interleukin-10 (IL-10). The compound is pegylated, which gives it extended life in the bloodstream, and appears to trigger T cells.
“We think that by giving an anti-PD-1 on top of the IL-10, you see it go faster to effectors,” said Van Vlasselaer to the San Francisco Business Times. The effectors are basically the immune system’s early warning system. “You’re blocking T cells from going into quiescent mode.”
The company is also developing its own anti-PD-1 drug which it licensed from Open Monoclonal Technology Inc. ARMO hopes to have it in the clinic in 2017. In addition to rights to the OMT’s PD-1 assets, it gained unlimited access to the company’s OmniRat, OmniMouse, and OmniFlic human antibody generation platforms.
“What we believe is that in the immuno-oncology space,” Van Vlasselaer told the San Francisco Business Times, “it’s important to have molecules that are affecting the immune suppression milieu of the tumor and eliciting immune responses to the tumor and causing tumors to be more immune-sensitive. The question is, who has that ‘other’ molecule to use in addition to the anti-PD-1—and we think we have that.”
