The company indicates it plans to use the proceeds from the latest financing to move its lead product candidates into clinical trials and to continue developing its exosome therapeutic platform.
Codiak BioSciences closed on a Series C financing round totaling $76.5 million. In its two years of existence, the company has rounded up $168.5 million. The company’s original investors participated, including ARCH Venture Partners, Flagship Pioneering, Fidelity Management and Research Company, the Alaska Permanent Fund, and Alexandria Venture Investments. They were joined by new investors Qatar Investment Authority, Boxer Capital of the Tavistock Group, Sirona Capital, EcoR1 Capital, and Casdin Capital.
Codiak focuses on exosome biology. Exosomes are vesicles released by all cells and are found in almost all body fluids. They are implicated in intercellular communication, and deliver DNA, RNA, proteins and lipids from cell to cell. The company is attempting to take advantage of that macromolecule payload delivery between cells. For some time, exosomes were viewed as being like garbage cans for cells with no other function. More recently, they were discovered to have communication and delivery functions.
The company indicates it plans to use the proceeds from the latest financing to move its lead product candidates into clinical trials and to continue developing its exosome therapeutic platform.
“Investors are clearly seeing the versatility of exosomes as a therapeutic platform with broad utility and the capacity to address currently undruggable targets, offering multiple paths to clinical and commercial success,” said Doug Williams, Codiak’s president and chief executive officer, in a statement. “Codiak has created a proprietary platform for exosome design and manufacturing that allows for precise targeting of important molecular pathways involved with human disease.”
The company doesn’t provide many specifics about its technology or lead compounds, or even its targets, other than to say it should be useful for multiple diseases. It has the rights to an investigational drug candidate for pancreatic cancer that it acquired from The University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, but it’s not clear if that’s the company’s lead compound.
In June, researchers at MD Anderson published an article in the journal Nature, “Exosomes facilitate therapeutic targeting of oncogenic KRAS in pancreatic cancer.” KRAS is a driver of pancreatic cancer. The scientists used exosomes to improve delivery of a short interfering RNA (siRNA) to the pancreas, which appeared to better bypass the immune system than artificial liposomes, and were preferentially engulfed by pancreatic tumor cells.
The paper’s senior author, Raghu Kalluri, is the scientific co-founder of Codiak. “Dr. Kalluri’s lab’s publication highlights the potential of exosomes as a therapeutic modality,” Williams said in a June statement. “The ability to target KRAS and the dramatic effects seen in models of pancreatic cancer illustrate just one possibility for exosomes as therapeutics. Codiak is building and expanding upon these important findings.”
One of Codiak’s original investors is the Alaska Permanent Fund, which dropped $80 million into the company in November 2015. Other companies the fund has invested in include Juno Therapeutics and Denali Therapeutics. It’s worth noting that all three of these companies have Alaskan-themed names, with Juneau the state’s capital, Kodiak the state’s brown bear, and its tallest mountain Denali. None of the companies are actually located in Alaska.
The Alaska fund works closely with Arch Venture Partners, who are experts in biotech startups. The goal is to raise money for Alaska, not to become a hub of biotech companies. It has an interest in long-term biotech investments.
