A bevy of other companies also brought in money on Thursday, including Alveus Therapeutics, Diagonal Therapeutics, EpiBiologics, Beacon Therapeutics and Protege.
Parabilis Medicines, formerly called FogPharma, has beefed up its bank account with $305 million in an oversubscribed series F round, leading a pack of other biopharma companies that announced their own raises on Thursday.
Parabilis’ money will go toward lead asset zolucatetide, an investigational peptide therapy being tested for rare and solid tumors. Zolucatetide blocks the interaction between β-catenin and T cell factor transcription complexes, according to the biotech’s news release. The binding of these two molecules is a key event in a crucial cancer cascade, and zolucatetide’s disruption of the interaction interrupts this pathway, the biotech explained on its website.
With the series F proceeds, Parabilis plans to push zolucatetide toward a registrational study in desmoid tumors, as well prep studies in other tumor types. The windfall will also go toward the biotech’s discovery-stage pipeline, including programs in prostate cancer.
Parabilis’ raise was co-led by RA Capital Management, Fidelity Management & Research Company and Janus Henderson Investors.
A slew of other companies also closed their respective fundraising efforts on Thursday. New obesity biotech Alveus Therapeutics launched on Thursday with a $160 million series A raise. That money will push the company’s lead molecule, ALV-100, a dual GIPR/GLP-1R agonist, into Phase II development. The company is also developing amylin-related molecules like ALV-200, an amylin receptor 3 peptide agonist.
Diagonal Therapeutics brought in $125 million in an oversubscribed series B round, co-led by Sanofi Ventures and Janus Henderson. Diagonal will funnel that money into DIAG723, a clustering antibody for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT) and pulmonary arterial hypertension, two diseases caused by dysregulated ALK1 signaling.
DIAG723 is set to enter a first-in-human trial for HHT in the first half of this year.
Just behind Alveus and Diagonal is Johnson & Johnson-backed EpiBiologics, which made $107 million in a series B. The extra capital will help the California biotech push its tissue-selective bispecific antibody EPI-326 into early clinical testing this year for non-small cell lung cancer and head and neck cancer. Alongside J&J, EpiBiologics’ fundraising round was co-led by Google Ventures.
Eye specialist Beacon Therapeutics also completed an oversubscribed funding initiative on Thursday, with $75 million in series C proceeds. With this money, Beacon plans to continue the development of laru-zova, a gene therapy candidate for X-linked retinitis pigmentosa, as well as prepare for commercialization.
New York-based AI company Protege likewise made $30 million in an extended series A round, which the company will use to accelerate product development and expand its data network “into new domains and data formats.”
