Mirador debuted last year with a massive $400 million and the goal of developing game-changing therapies for inflammatory and fibrotic diseases. The company aims to enter the clinic this year.
Mirador Therapeutics is not making immunology and inflammation medicines for today. CEO Mark McKenna wants to be the creator of 2030’s great breakthrough in the space.
“We are trying to figure out where the puck is going to be in that 2030 timeframe, not where it is necessarily today,” McKenna said.
The precision medicine biotech, which arrived on the scene almost exactly a year ago with a whopping $400 million in Series A financing, is going about this in two ways. One is to build out a pipeline of therapies for immune-mediated inflammatory and fibrotic diseases. The other is to buy some assets in those areas to turn the early-stage biotech into a clinical-stage one sooner rather than later.
McKenna told BioSpace on the sidelines of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January that his team had combed through data on about 300 different potential programs, thinking that such an acquisition would be the quickest way to the clinic. But Mirador’s own precision medicine platform has been churning out potential gems faster than expected, he said.
“We went into this maybe thinking that 80% of our innovation would come from external. It’s been really inverted,” McKenna said.
Mirador has been intentionally quiet on its activities since launching. While speed was once the currency in biotech, now it’s stealth, McKenna said. Operating in stealth has become particularly important given increasing pressure from innovative biotechs coming out of China, he noted.
“We’re driving a bigger competitive mode by keeping our cards close to the vest,” McKenna said. “At the right time, we will update people. It’s premature right now. We’re not looking for validation. What we’re looking for is really cool science that’s going to move the field forward.”
McKenna did give a little detail on what the team has been doing. The focus has been on truly novel precision medicine targets and combination therapies that are the next big thing in their indications.
Mirador is currently working on moving five to six programs towards the clinic, MnKenna said. He declined to provide further details or a timeline for naming indications and candidates.
“This is going to be a really exciting story in the back half of this decade, as we start to figure out what is the next breakthrough therapy in this in this class,” McKenna said.
Bringing things back to 2025, McKenna said the external asset search was supposed to be the starting point. He said the team looked at T cell engagers but determined that to be a tough area given the competition. One of the challenges of finding new drugs to develop right now is that Mirador is “looking in the same pools as Big Pharma.”
The company also plans to apply its Mirador360 precision development platform to the external assets. The technology analyzes patient molecular profiles to discover genetic associations to immuno-fibrotic diseases. This can help pin down specific populations, develop diagnostics and generate clinical development programs.
“I would just say thus far, only a few have passed through our funnel,” McKenna said of the assets Mirador has looked at.
Mirador’s first fundraising was a big one, landing in the top of venture capital raises for 2024. But just because the company is cash-comfortable doesn’t mean McKenna isn’t being careful. He said the goal has been to ensure the R&D engine is productive in relation to every dollar spent.
The $400 million raise was led by ARCH Venture Partners, with other participation from OrbiMed and Fairmount early on, plus more than a dozen other venture and hedge funds. This has positioned Mirador well for when the company begins to look at the public markets, McKenna said.
“But for today, 2025 is a year of execution. It’s focusing on advancing these programs into IND and in the clinic,” McKenna said. “And who knows, if things go our way, we could have not one, not two, but possibly three or four INDs in 2025.”
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