Biotech upstart gets $50M to test new virus-based therapies against solid tumors

The team at On­coMyx is try­ing to lever­age one ther­a­peu­tic to treat sev­er­al forms of can­cer, us­ing the Myx­o­ma virus. Wednes­day, it an­nounced the clos­ing of a $50 mil­lion Se­ries B fi­nanc­ing to take it a step clos­er to that goal. The round was co-led by Lu­mi­ra Ven­tures and B Cap­i­tal Group with par­tic­i­pa­tion from LYZZ Cap­i­tal and its Se­ries A in­vestors Boehringer In­gel­heim Ven­ture Fund, De­los Cap­i­tal, Xer­aya Cap­i­tal, Ko­rea In­vest­ment Part­ners, City Hill Ven­tures, and Madi­son Part­ners. Beni Rovin­s­ki, the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor at Lu­mi­ra Ven­tures, and Widya Mulyasas­mi­ta, the se­nior prin­ci­pal of health­care at B Cap­i­tal Group, will join the com­pa­nies board of di­rec­tors.

‘We’re pret­ty ex­cit­ed about it, we’re re­al­ly kind of right on track for get­ting this par­tic­u­lar pro­gram in­to peo­ple,’ CEO Steve Potts said. Potts has worked in on­col­o­gy for two decades, get­ting his PhD from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia-Davis and work­ing for Sur­roMed, Biovia and Quest Di­ag­nos­tics in his ear­ly ca­reer. Most re­cent­ly, he was with Igny­ta, which he called a clas­sic pre­ci­sion med­i­cine sto­ry in which he had an amaz­ing in­hibitor, and they test­ed 30,000 pa­tients in 16 coun­tries, just to get 50 peo­ple for tri­als. With On­coMyx, the goal is to lever­age myx­o­ma’s unique qual­i­ties to build a one-ther­a­peu­tic im­munother­a­py plat­form to de­liv­er mul­ti­ple can­cer-killing pay­loads.

There are three things that are tru­ly need­ed: a pro­gram­ma­ble mul­ti-arm­ing con­cept; sys­temic, IV de­liv­ery; and a non­hu­man pathogen to get around any pre-ex­ist­ing hu­man im­mu­ni­ty. The mul­ti-armed myx­o­ma virus de­liv­ers dif­fer­ent an­ti-tu­mor im­munomod­u­la­to­ry pro­teins that hit crit­i­cal points in the can­cer’s im­mu­ni­ty cy­cle and stim­u­late an an­ti-tu­mor re­sponse. Since it’s not a hu­man pathogen, there’s no pre-ex­ist­ing im­mu­ni­ty to over­come.

‘If you look at im­munother­a­py cur­rent­ly, about 1 of every 7 pa­tients are cur­rent­ly ben­e­fit­ing from im­munother­a­py..and that’s kind of across the board, across all tu­mors types,’ Potts said in a call with End­points News. ‘Of course we all know that every­body’s try­ing a lot of dif­fer­ent things, but what we see here is that we can pro­gram a virus with mul­ti­ple ad­di­tion­al trans­genes in it and de­liv­ery it sys­tem­i­cal­ly to re­al­ly move that nee­dle so that 6 out of 7 pa­tients that cur­rent­ly aren’t ben­e­fit­ing from im­munother­a­py, we can get that num­ber down.’

Pre­clin­i­cal da­ta show that On­coMyx has shown safe­ty and ef­fi­ca­cy in a range of can­cers, from hema­to­log­i­cal ma­lig­nan­cies to sol­id tu­mor, the com­pa­ny said. The fund­ing will help them ad­vance the pro­gram in GI tu­mors. It will al­so go to­ward im­prov­ing the man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tions.

Cur­rent­ly, On­coMyx is part­nered with one US-based man­u­fac­tur­er. The man­u­fac­tur­ing process for the myx­o­ma virus is sim­i­lar to the man­u­fac­tur­ing process for the small­pox vac­cine, and the com­pa­ny is us­ing that al­ready-ex­ist­ing know-how to ap­ply that to its newest process.

‘Some of that vac­cine knowl­edge we can cer­tain­ly ap­ply, and we have been as we build this out,’ he said. ‘The nice thing about this par­tic­u­lar virus is that it’s very sta­ble, and so once it’s en­gi­neered, it lends it­self to man­u­fac­tur­ing. You can put six dif­fer­ent an­ti-can­cer agents in­to it, and still have the virus be­have as it be­haves in na­ture. It’s very ex­cit­ing.’
https://endpts.com/biotech-upstart-gets-50m-to-test-new-virus-based-therapies-against-solid-tumors/