The round was led by new investor Abingworth with participation from another new investor, 5AM Ventures, LSP and Versant Ventures.
NousCom announced it has raised $49 million in a Series B financing. The round was led by new investor Abingworth with participation from another new investor, 5AM Ventures, and existing investors LSP and Versant Ventures.
NousCom is an immuno-oncology company focused on cancer vaccines. It closed a $14 million Series A in the spring of 2016, and indicates with this new funding that it has a runway to last through 2021.
The company will use the money to move its lead program, NOUS-209, into Phase I/II clinical trials in 2018. NOUS-209 is an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine. The trial will be to prevent the occurrence of cancer in Lynch Syndrome Carriers. This genetically-defined population has a higher risk of colorectal, endometrial and gastric cancers. NOUS-209 is being developed as a vaccine for cancers characterized by Microsatellite Instability, which affect DNA repair.
It also is working to develop NOUS-100-PV. This is a personalized neoantigen-based vaccine and the company plans to get it into the clinic in the second half of next year. It also has a third program, an oncolytic virus that targets cancer cells. It is built on a second Endovax platform, which is in the discovery phase.
The company’s platform technology is Endovax, which is made up of viral vector-based genetic vaccines that encode cancer neoantigens.
“This financing, by experienced life sciences investors, represents an important validation of our platform and development strategy,” said Alfredo Nicosia, NousCom’s chief executive officer, in a statement. “We are delighted to welcome new investors Abingworth and 5AM and would like to thank our existing investors, LSP and Versant Venture. This investment will enable us to leverage our best in class Exovax platform to accelerate clinical development of our programs.”
What distinguishes NousCom’s approach from most currently-approved immuno-oncology products is the off-the-shelf component. Most immuno-oncology products are customized for each patient. This typically requires drawing blood from the patient, shipping it to a facility where the T-cells are isolated, reengineered, and sent back to the patient’s physician to be infused. Although very effective, it is labor-intensive, time-consuming and expensive. With an off-the-shelf approach, NousCom hopes to be able to develop a standard set of vaccines for a broad variety of tumors. But it’s also working on a customized version as well.
The NousCom management team has significant expertise in drug development. John Carroll, writing for Endpoints News, says, “Nicosia and co-founder Riccardo Cortese—the original NousCom CEO who died earlier this year—had managed Okairos until GlaxoSmithKline came along to bag the company and its tech for spurring an immune assault on infectious diseases for $325 million in 2013. And now Nicosia and the team are off building a pair of new platforms, keying off of their knowledge of the immune system in the sizzling hot immuno-oncology arena, with a fresh $49 million round to push the lead program into the clinic next year.”
Nicosia was also part of a team that came out of Merck in 2007.
NousCom also is working with what Carroll calls “a transatlantic group of VCs” to provide a backbone of financing and look for potential development partners as results comes in from the pending clinical trials.
