Abdera Therapeutics will use the money to fund its ROVEr platform and advance its lead asset ABD-147 for small-cell lung cancer.
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Thursday, West Coast-based Abdera Therapeutics debuted with $142 million in combined Series A and Series B funding, seeking to develop the next generation of precision radiopharmaceuticals.
Abdera’s Series A round was led by Versant Ventures and Amplitude Ventures. The Series B financing push was led by venBio Partners. Abdera’s founding investors are the antibody-focused biotech AbCellera and life sciences investment firm adMare BioInnovations.
Current targeted radiotherapy approaches use either small ligands, which often don’t reach therapeutic levels inside tumors and lead to kidney toxicity, or large proteins such as antibodies, which can only weakly penetrate tumors and lead to systemic exposure, according to Abdera.
Abdera’s proprietary platform ROVEr allows the company to engineer radiotherapeutic agents that strike an optimal balance between these two standard approaches. ROVEr produces antibody-based medicines bearing a high-affinity antigen-binding domain to seek out and specifically target cancer cells.
The resulting radiopharmaceuticals also have a specifically engineered Fc domain, which can fine-tune the molecule’s pharmacokinetic profile, allowing it to strongly penetrate the tumor while also limiting off-target systemic side effects and kidney and liver toxicity.
The company’s targeted radiotherapeutic molecules are heavy-chain-only antibodies. Abdera believes these are “the optimal size to achieve an ideal balance of target specificity, tumor penetration and accumulation of the radioisotope while avoiding high renal uptake,” Adam Judge, co-founder and senior vice president of research at Abdera, said in a statement.
Abdera will leverage this modular approach to precision radiotherapy to address cancer types new to this drug class.
Its lead asset, ABD-147, targets the delta-like ligand 3 (DLL3), a protein that plays a role in the Notch signaling cascade. While DLL3 has a well-validated role in small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and other solid tumors, it has been difficult to target with conventional treatment modalities due to its low expression levels, Yvonne Yamanaka, principal at venBio Partners, said in a statement.
Abdera is currently advancing its DLL3-targeting therapeutic through pre-clinical development and expects to file an Investigational New Drug application with the FDA in 2024, according to the press release.
The start-up is also currently working on four other pre-clinical assets, all for undisclosed targets.
To help Abdera advance its pipeline of novel precision radiotherapeutic agents, the company will be helmed by industry leaders who bring decades of experience to the company. Lori Lyons-Williams, its president and CEO, was most recently chief operating officer of Neumora, a clinical-stage biotech focused on precision treatments for neurology indications.
Lyons-Williams had also previously served for 15 years at Allergan.
Judge, meanwhile, was previously consulting head of biology at Genevant Sciences and served as research director at Tekmira Pharmaceuticals before joining Abdera.
Tristan Manalac is an independent science writer based in metro Manila, Philippines. He can be reached at tristan@tristanmanalac.com or tristan.manalac@biospace.com
