The Connecticut-based biotech, which emerged from stealth last year, has secured $202 million to date as it looks to move two assets targeting prostate and breast cancer into the clinic.
Halda Therapeutics, a Connecticut-based biotech founded by Yale professor and entrepreneur Craig Crews, announced Monday that it has raised $126 million in a Series B extension to move two candidates into clinical trials for patients with prostate and breast cancer.
The biotech has been developing a new class of cancer therapies known as Regulated Induced Proximity Targeting Chimeras (RIPTAC). According to Halda, these assets use a “hold and kill” mechanism using two proteins, one cancer-specific and one with an essential function. The candidates are designed to help retract essential cell function and cause the death of the cancer cells while preserving non-cancer tissue.
“This financing will enable us to bring to patients our oral, selective and widely applicable cancer cell-killing mechanism that is designed to overcome drug resistance, which is a major shortcoming of many current standard of care cancer treatments,” Kat Kayser-Bricker, Halda chief scientific officer, said in a statement.
Halda’s lead asset, HLD-0915, aims to treat metastatic, castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) and will start Phase I trials in the first half of 2025, thanks to the latest round of funding. The cash from the Series B extension will also allow the biotech to support the development of a RIPTAC asset for metastatic breast cancer, which is in the preclinical stage. Funding will also be used to build the team at Halda further and develop more products using the RIPTAC platform.
New investors participating in the funding, which brought the total amount raised to date to $202 million, included RA Capital Management, Deep Track Capital, Frazier Life Sciences, Vida Ventures, Boxer Capital and Taiho Ventures. The Series B extension also included participation from existing investors such as Canaan Partners, Connecticut Innovations, Access Biotechnology and Elm Street Ventures.
“Novel mechanisms are desperately needed to address resistance to standard of care therapies across several tumor types. RIPTAC therapies can selectively kill cancer cells based on differential protein expression in orally bioavailable medicines,” Joe Cabral, principal at Frazier Life Sciences, said in a statement. “This innovation has the potential to treat both advanced cancer patients with heterogeneous resistance adaptations, as well as patients with earlier stages of disease.”
Halda emerged from stealth last year with $76 million in its arsenal. Crews was also the founder of Arvinas, which has since worked with major pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer, which inked a potential $2 billion deal with Arvinas in 2021.
