Crinetics Pharma Spinout Launches with Sight Set on Radiopharmaceuticals

Radiopharmaceuticals have been gaining lots of interest in recent years, and now there is a new company taking a swing at it. Late Monday, Crinetics Pharmaceuticals, along with 5AM Ventures and Frazier Healthcare Partners, announced that it was spinning out a new company, Radionetics Oncology.

The new, independently operated company is launching with a $30 million private financing and will develop a pipeline of novel, targeted radiopharmaceuticals for the treatment of a wide variety of oncology indications. Radiopharmaceuticals contain a radioactive substance that can be used to diagnose and treat a range of diseases, which in Radionetics’ case is cancer.

 “Radiopharmaceuticals have emerged as an important class of oncology therapeutics demonstrating survival benefits for patients in multiple tumor settings including prostate cancer and neuroendocrine tumors,” said David Allison, Ph.D., a partner at 5AM Ventures and member of the Radionetics board of directors. “We are launching Radionetics with what we believe to be a promising pipeline to expand the utility of radiopharmaceuticals to novel targets. We look forward to building on Crinetics’ world-class expertise in discovery and development of small molecule therapeutics targeting peptide receptors for the benefit of cancer patients.”

Radionetics’ launch is going hand-in-hand with an exclusive worldwide license for the company with the potential for a large payout. The license will allow the company to use Crinetics’ radiotherapeutics technology platform and its associated intellectual property to develop radiotherapeutics and radio-imaging agents. The deal has milestones worth over $1 billion.

Crinetics co-founders Yun-Fei (Frank) Zhu, Ph.D. and Ana K. Kusnetzow, Ph.D. will serve on the new company’s leadership team, along with other highly experienced life sciences professionals.

“Having such an experienced team, Radionetics is well positioned to move expeditiously towards the clinic and full realization of the potential of this platform technology,” said Daniel Estes, Ph.D., general partner at Frazier Healthcare Partners and member of the Radionetics board of directors. “This is amplified by our collaboration with Crinetics and the direct commitment and participation of key members of the Crinetics founding team who built the underlying technology platform.”

Research in the radiopharmaceutical space has exploded over the past few years, which has found that radiation therapy at a cellular level might be able to reduce short- and long-term side effects of standard treatment methods. In 2019, the NCI launched an initiative to boost promising radiopharmaceutical trials.

“I think they’re going to transform radiation oncology in the next 10 to 15 years,” said Charles Kunos, M.D., Ph.D., of NCI’s Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program.

Since research in the space is still fairly new, long-term safety studies are still needed to evaluate possible side effects months - and years - after treatment.