Eidos Therapeutics closed on a $64 million Series B financing round. The funds will be used to advance the company’s product candidate, AG10, into Phase II clinical trials and Phase III trials.
San Francisco-based Eidos Therapeutics closed on a $64 million Series B financing round. It was led by RA Capital Management and included Eidos’ parent company, BioBridge Pharma. It was joined by new investors Janus Henderson, Viking Global Investors, Aisling Capital, Perceptive Advisors, Cormorant Asset Management and Amzak Health Investors.
The funds will be used to advance the company’s product candidate, AG10, into Phase II clinical trials and Phase III trials. AG10 is an oral, small molecule that stabilizes tetrameric TTR. It is being evaluated to treat transthyretin amyloidosis (ATTR), a rare genetic disease.
This family of diseases includes three distinct disorders: wild-type ATTR cardiomyopathy (ATTRwt-CM), mutant ATTR cardiomyopathy (ATTRm-CM), and ATTR polyneuropathy (ATTR-PN). The diseases occur worldwide in about 200,000 people, 40,000 people, and 10,000 people, respectively. All are progressive and fatal, and no disease-modifying therapies have been approved yet.
“Our clinical data demonstrate that AG10 has a safe, well-tolerated profile and is able to stabilize 100 percent of plasma TTR at peak concentrations and provide average levels of stabilization greater than 95 percent at steady-state,” said Neil Kumar, Eidos’ chief executive officer, in a statement. “Given that increasing levels of stabilization have yielded progressively better clinical results in past trials, our near-complete levels of stabilization suggest that AG10 could be a best-in-class solution. We are targeting ATTR at its source by stabilizing TTR, an approach that is validated by genetics and clinical data.”
As part of this financing, RA Capital’s managing director and portfolio manager, Rajeev Shah, and Eric Aguiar, partner at Aisling Capital, will join Neil Kumar and Yoyoung Hu on Eidos’ board of directors.
The company launched in April 2017 with a $27 million commitment by BridgeBio. The company’s focus is on TTR amyloidosis. AG10 was discovered and began development by the company’s co-founders, Isabella Graef and Marmoun Alhamadsheh, via research funded by Stanford Medicine’s SPARK program. To date, the company has raised a total of $91 million.
BridgeBio is a clinical-stage biotech company that develops genetically-targeted drugs. It was founded in 2015 by a group of industry veterans. Part of the company’s business model is to develop a subsidiary company around a compound. The subsidiary company then utilizes shared resources. BridgeBio states, “This efficient, de-centralized corporate structure enables focus at the level of each disease, but provides diversification and the ability to scale across many opportunities.”
Eidos is one of about 10 BridgeBio companies, some of which are yet to be disclosed. They include QED Therapeutics, Navire, Pellepharm and Phoenix Tissue Repair. Overall, they have developed over 30 molecules through IND applications and more than 10 marketed drugs.
Of today’s news, Shah said in a statement, “ATTR diseases are a large and growing unmet need, and together, they represent one of the largest genetically-defined diseases with inadequate standard of care. We look forward to working with Eidos’ proven management team to bring a disease-modifying treatment for ATTR to market as quickly as possible.”
