The new company, BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics, is looking to advance two KRAS inhibitors and a blocker of the interaction between the RAS and PI3K pathways.
BridgeBio announced Thursday that it has secured $200 million in financing to spinout a former subsidiary to develop a KRAS-focused oncology portfolio.
Called BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics (BBOT), the company was initially formed as a subsidiary of BridgeBio known as TheRas. According to an SEC filing, the subsidiary has existed since 2016 and formed a research and development agreement with Leidos Biomedical Research in 2017.
BBOT’s mission now is to generate a pipeline of small molecule therapeutics targeting RAS and PI3K malignancies. The company aims to advance three programs, including BBO-8520, a direct inhibitor of KRAS that seeks to bind to the protein’s “on” and “off” states. The spinout is enrolling patients with mutant non-small cell lung cancer in a Phase Ia/Ib trial.
A second asset that BBOT will be advancing is BBO-10203, a PI3Kα:RAS breaker that blocks the interaction between RAS and PI3Ka to inhibit the PI3Kα/AKT effector signaling in tumors. The company plans to file an IND application sometime in the second quarter of 2024 and enroll patients later this year.
The other asset is BBO-11818, a pan-KRAS inhibitor that is going after the “on” and “off” states of KRASG12X, and BBOT plans to file an IND sometime in early 2025.
The company is also pursuing a discovery-stage research program focused on developing assets that target additional oncogenic drivers within the RAS and PI3K pathways.
“We believe the launch of BBOT better aligns investors with an opportunity that was being hidden in our pipeline, and our partnership with these new investors enables us to prosecute these oncology programs more quickly and with higher fidelity,” BridgeBio CEO Neil Kumar said in a statement.
The spinout secured its $200 million financing in an oversubscribed round led by Cormorant Asset Management and co-led by Omega Funds. There was also participation from GV (Google Ventures), Deerfield Management, EcoR1 Capital, Wellington Management, Enavate Sciences, Surveyor Capital, Casdin Captial, Aisling Capital, and Longwood Fund.
BBOT will headed by Eli Wallace, BridgeBio’s CEO of oncology R&D. Wallace joined BridgeBio in 2019 after serving as the chief scientific officer at Peloton Therapeutics. Kumar will also serve as a director of BBOT.
“In conjunction with BridgeBio and an amazing suite of investors, we look forward to seeing all three of our programs progress into the clinic over the next 12 months,” Wallace said in a statement.
BridgeBio has gone down the spinout path before, launching QED Therapeutics in 2018. The company secured $65 million and aimed to develop infigratinib, a cancer asset that Novartis abandoned. Infigratinib was given accelerated approval by the FDA in 2021.
Tyler Patchen is a staff writer at BioSpace. You can reach him at tyler.patchen@biospace.com. Follow him on LinkedIn.
