After the successful development of mavacamten and the sale of MyoKardia to BMS in 2020, former executives of the biotech are back together with a mission to make cardiovascular disease curable and preventable.
Capping off a flurry of mega-round launches this week, Kardigan debuted Friday with an all-star cast and an ambitious mission: to unseat cardiovascular disease as the leading cause of death worldwide.
The San Francisco and New Jersey–based company announced the closing of a $300 million Series A round led by Perceptive Advisors, ARCH Venture Partners and Sequoia Heritage.
Helmed by former MyoKardia CEO Tassos Gianakakos, Kardigan is taking a targeted approach to cardiovascular disease. The biotech’s platform “leverages a proprietary set of cardiac-specific tools that enable a deep understanding of the mechanisms across its therapeutic candidates as well as patients’ individualized responses to treatment,” according to its Friday press release.
“For decades, our team has observed significant treatment gaps across cardiovascular disease - from clinical care to investment in new medicines,” Gianakakos said in the statement. “While current standards of care play an important role, collectively, they fail to address the global health emergency in front of us.”
Kardigan is the latest play from Gianakakos and fellow MyoKardia alumni Jay Edelberg (chief medical officer at Kardigan) and Bob McDowell (the new company’s chief scientific officer). The execs led the development of mavacamten, which in 2022 became the first FDA-approved cardiac myosin inhibitor specifically targeting the source of obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The approval was granted to Bristol Myers Squibb, which acquired MyoKardia for $13.1 billion in October 2020.
The team’s initial focus at Kardigan will be on disease opportunities and patient segments that are resistant or poorly managed on current therapies, including primary and secondary cardiomyopathies leading to heart failure, according to the press release.
The cardiovascular space—and cardiomyopathies specifically—are experiencing a renaissance of late with the November 2024 FDA approval of Attruby for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM). The greenlight set up a head-to-head competition with Pfizer’s Vyndaqel and Vyndamax (tafamidis) in an increasingly crowded space that could soon see the addition of Alnylam’s Amvuttra (vutrisiran).
In a recent interview with BioSpace, Tenaya Therapeutics CEO Faraz Ali said it is currently a “golden era for cardiomyopathies,” noting the advent of multiple modalities, including gene therapies. Tenaya itself is developing an investigational gene therapy for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy targeting mutations in the MYBPC3 gene.
As biopharma gets set for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference next week, several new companies have burst onto the scene. Also on Friday, GSK-based Ouro Medicines announced that it had raised $115 million to advance a pipeline of T cell engagers. In the obesity space, Verdiva Bio broke cover Thursday with $411 million in Series A funds to develop a potentially first-in-class oral GLP-1 receptor agonist and other next-gen therapies. And on Wednesday, Tenvie Therapeutics launched with $200 million and assets from Denali Therapeutics to go after neurological diseases. Rounding out the group was Denmark’s oral medicine–focused Orbis Medicines, which raised a $93.2 million Series A and added Eli Lilly to its stable of investors.
