January 7, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
Massachusetts cancer therapy company Blend Therapeutics Inc. said Wednesday that it has raised $21 million from its existing venture investors in an expansion of the Series B round, as well as debt financing from an unnamed institutional investment firm.
Blend also announced its new Pentarin platform, which uses nanoparticles to attack cancer cells internally. It added that Dennis Ausiello, physician-in-chief emeritus at Massachusetts General Hospital, has joined the company’s board of directors.
The VC outfits that have been funding Blend so far are NanoDimension, Flagship Ventures and New Enterprise Associates, three firms that have staked a total of $39.8 million in four rounds to help the startup roll out its novel cancer platform. Most of that funding so far has been used to advance Blend’s two primary drug candidates, Pentarin-based BTP-277 and cisplatin BTP-114.
Watertown, Mass.-based Blend said it would use today’s funding to study and create more drugs that use miniaturized biologic drug conjugates, or mBDCs, encapsulated in nanoparticles, to help penetrate tumors more deeply than traditional therapies.
“Pentarins are an entirely new class of biologic drug conjugates specifically designed for solid tumors, and represent a significant advance in the field since the first development of antibody drug conjugates 35 years ago,” said Richard Wooster, president of research and development at Blend, in a statement. “We have created Pentarins to have a unique structure, miniaturization and nanoparticle encapsulation that enable the selective targeting of cancer cells and unprecedented penetration deep into tumor tissue, with the aim to improve the treatment of solid tumor cancers for patients.”
Blend said it will use some of the money to shepherd BTP-114 through studies to enable the filing of an investigational new drug (IND) application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It said it also “anticipates developing” Pentarins in partnership with biotechnology and pharmaceutical collaborators “who have their own proprietary targeting protein scaffolds” to be used in conjuction with their own technology.
“Blend has made enormous progress to deploy its suite of technologies and oncology R&D expertise to create the valuable Pentarin platform and a pipeline that has come into view and is recognized by Blend’s investors,” said Omid Farohkzad, founder and chairman of Blend Therapeutics and associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
“While the company’s mission has remained steadfast – to develop cancer therapies with superior efficacy and selectivity that push conventional therapeutic boundaries – Blend has quietly consolidated its capabilities into the technologically superior Pentarin platform and implemented a thorough and comprehensive intellectual property strategy to advance the field of biologic drug conjugates and have much broader potential impact for patients with solid tumors.”
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Could Pfizer Be Eyeing AbbVie? Analysts continue to speculate on possible acquisition targets for Pfizer. Again, in a news report last week, the speculation is that AbbVie could be a potential target. What do you think? BioSpace wants your opinion! Results will be published on Friday, Jan. 9.
