Jonathan Montagu (L) and Gerry Harriman, HotSpot co-founders
HotSpot Therapeutics, the allostery-focused biotech that works on what it calls ‘natural hotspots’ — hence the name — is getting a bit hotter in its valuation from investors. And to that end they’ve raised $100 million.
The four-year-old AI computational biotech started by two former Nimbus execs announced this morning that it closed its Series C round right at the line of a 9-figure investment, courtesy of some big investors.
Pivotal bioVenture Partners took the lead on the round — with ‘significant participation’ by LSP and B Capital Group. A slew of new investors hopped on the bandwagon, such as Monashee Investment Management and Revelation Partners, along with some old investors like Atlas Venture, SR One Capital Management and Sofinnova Partners.
This new round more than doubles what HotSpot has previously raised, bringing it to a total of $190 million. The last time HotSpot raised funds was in May 2020, when the biotech announced a $65 million Series B.
The biotech follows in Nimbus’ footsteps of developing therapies for so-called allosteric targets using a computational platform — looking at protein pockets beyond active sites to find ways to drug proteins that were previously deemed undruggable or hard to drug.
And as with many rounds, there’s also board appointments. Ash Khanna, a venture partner with Pivotal bioVenture Partners, and Fouad Azzam of LSP will join HotSpot’s board of directors.
For HotSpot’s co-founders, CEO Jonathan Montagu and CSO Gerry Harriman, this allows HotSpot to pivot more into clinical development.
And with the Series C, an IPO is usually not far behind. As Montagu put it, this raise puts HotSpot ‘in the driver’s seat,’ he told Endpoints News — and while it’s too early to consider a move into the public equity market, he says it allows HotSpot the flexibility as to when it goes public.
With the cash runway until 2024, the new round allows the biotech to move programs into the IND-enabling phase, Montagu said. Their plan is to file an IND on their lead program sometime next year — a CBL-B target focusing on the E3 ligase — after HotSpot nominates a development candidate for that target. Eventually, HotSpot’s goal is to start dosing patients in a clinical setting by the end of 2022.
The company hopes the IND will be the first of many. Outside of the company’s 3 publicly-known targets, there’s a few more that remain undisclosed that, in Montagu’s mind, gives HotSpot leverage in efficient R&D.
‘We’re going to scale the company so that we can have a steady state of 2-3 lead optimization programs at any one time, which will translate into a steady cadence of molecules entering the clinic,’ Montagu said in an interview.
Outside of the pipeline, the company is also looking to increase the number of employees — which is currently split between Boston and New Jersey. HotSpot is currently expanding its team overseas in Berlin, Germany, Montagu confirmed.
‘What we would like to do is to really build out a number of areas in our research organization that can not only support a growing pipeline, but also make deep investments into our platform. So we will see growth in areas such as biology, chemistry, and then our AI efforts in our platform,’ Harriman told Endpoints in an interview.
Harriman also said they would hire outside companies for manufacturing when it reaches that point.
While oncology researchers have long pursued the potential of cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, it was unclear whether these therapies would ever reach patients due to the complexity of manufacturing and costs of development. Fortunately, the recent successful development and regulatory approval of chimeric antigen receptor-engineered T (CAR-T) cells have demonstrated the significant benefit of these therapies to patients.
Tillman Gerngross (Adagio)
Tillman Gerngross, the rarely shy Dartmouth professor, biotech entrepreneur and antibody expert, has been warning for over a year that the virus behind Covid-19 would likely continue to mutate, potentially in ways that avoid immunity from infection and the best defenses scientists developed. He spun out a company, Adagio, to build a universal antibody, one that could snuff out any potential mutation.
Unlock this article along with other benefits by subscribing to one of our paid plans.
Most drug development professionals are familiar with the nerve-racking wait for the read-out of a large trial. If it’s negative, is the investigational therapy ineffective? Or could the failure result from an unforeseen flaw in the design or execution of the protocol, rather than a lack of efficacy? The team could spend weeks analyzing data, but a definitive answer may be elusive due to insufficient power for such analyses in the already completed trial. These problems are only made worse if the trial had lower enrollment, or higher dropout than expected due to an unanticipated event like COVID-19. And if a trial is negative, the next one is likely to be larger and more costly — if it happens at all.
Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission
As Americans were waking up for their Black Friday rituals, they were greeted with the news that a new mutation of the Covid-19 virus has appeared and been sequenced — after it caught an international flight to Hong Kong. And two of the leading Covid-19 vaccine developers promised delivery of a new vaccine ‘within 100 days’ if necessary while a third spelled out its 3-prong strategy hours later.
Unlock this story instantly and join 124,100+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it’s free.
Shankar Musunuri, Ocugen CEO
Back in July, Ocugen and Bharat Biotech unveiled some Phase III data suggesting their Covid-19 vaccine, Covaxin, was 77.8% effective at preventing overall disease in India. They’re now looking to launch an immuno-bridging study to see if those numbers hold up in the US — but on Friday, the FDA said not so fast.
Regulators have placed a clinical hold on the partners’ IND, Ocugen shared on Friday. Ocugen’s stock $OCGN sank 9% on the news Friday, but was up almost 7% in pre-market trading on Monday.
The emergence of the Omicron variant over the holiday has reignited the focus on vaccine equity, and in its efforts to bring more shots to Africa, one South African biotech is reportedly close to reproducing Moderna’s mRNA shot.
Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines is speeding toward its pivotal trials, the Washington Post reported Sunday, though it’s doing so without Moderna’s recipe. The biotech reportedly has finished sequencing the Moderna vaccine and plans to soon compare its own recreation to Moderna’s jab.
Welcome back to Endpoints Weekly, your review of the week’s top biopharma headlines. Want this in your inbox every Saturday morning? Current Endpoints readers can visit their reader profile to add Endpoints Weekly. New to Endpoints? Sign up here.
Happy Thanksgiving to all those who are celebrating it — although, if we are being honest, this week’s abbreviated edition is really for those who are not. Wherever you’re tuning in from, we appreciate your support, hope you find this recap helpful and we wish you a wonderful weekend.
Unlock this story instantly and join 124,100+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it’s free.
At the beginning of this year, I laid out a basic objective for Endpoints News as we headed to our 5th anniversary. We’ve long been doing a fine job covering the breaking news in R&D — if I do say so myself — but we needed to expand our horizons on industry coverage, increase the staff and go much, much deeper when the stories demanded it.
In a phrase: broader and deeper.
It’s safe to say, based on our daily web traffic, that you all seemed to like this idea. We’ve doubled the staff — thanks to a growing group of paid subscribers — ramped up the daily report and now publish a regular slate of in-depth articles. And traffic — those clicks you always read about — have gone up in volume too. Monthly sessions are up 43%, to close to 1.5 million. Unique readers are up 63%, to 874,480 in October, after setting a record of close to a million the month before. Page views are running at 3 million-plus a month. And the overall number of subscribers has surged to 124,000.
Unlock this story instantly and join 124,100+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it’s free.
The FDA has slapped a clinical hold on the early-stage program for one of Kura Oncology’s cancer drugs following a patient’s death in a clinical trial.
The biotech $KURA reported early Wednesday that the Phase Ib study of KO-539 for acute myeloid leukemia would be halted, suspending enrollment, while researchers and the FDA probed the death. Patients already on the drug can continue taking it.
Unlock this story instantly and join 124,100+ biopharma pros reading Endpoints daily — and it’s free.
https://endpts.com/hotspot-gets-hotter-with-100m-raise-to-push-toward-clinic/
