The Danish startup, whose lead candidate has parallels to Amgen’s MariTide, launches on the heels of Amgen’s Phase II data release for the drug last week.
There’s a new player on the obesity block. Antag Therapeutics secured €80 million ($84 million) in series A financing Wednesday, led by Versant Ventures and supported by fellow Denmark company Novo Holdings, the controlling shareholder of Danish drug developer and obesity powerhouse Novo Nordisk.
Antag’s lead asset AT-7687, currently on the cusp of clinical development, is designed to be co-administrated with current or future obesity therapies including GLP-1 medicines to deliver superior weight loss and metabolic benefits, per the announcement. Antag emphasized the candidate’s “flexibility in dosing,” including “the ability to optimally drug each target for maximal efficacy and tolerability.”
“We believe our first-in-class peptide’s weight loss profile and flexible dosing will be key drivers of differentiation,” Alexander Hovard Sparre-Ulrich, CEO and co-founder of Antag, said in a statement.
The FDA signed off on Antag’s Investigational New Drug application for AT-7687 in October, and the company expects to begin clinical trials early in 2025. The studies will assess AT-7687 as both a monotherapy and in combination with a GLP-1 receptor agonist in patients with obesity.
Funds from the series A—which also included participation from SR One, Dawn Biopharma and Longview Ventures, among others—will be used to support the clinical development of AT-7687 as well as the expansion of Antag’s pipeline of monthly injectable therapies, according to the press release.
“The backing of such a strong syndicate of global investors is a testament to our pioneering approach to developing novel therapies for patients with obesity,” Sparre-Ulrich said.
Antag’s debut is timely given its parallels with Amgen’s MariTide, for which the company released Phase II data last week. Like MariTide, AT-7687 is a subcutaneous antagonist of the glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide Receptor (GIPR). MariTide also targets the GLP-1 receptor. AT-7687 is a once-weekly injection while MariTide is once-monthly.
In an investor note Wednesday, Jefferies said that Novo’s investment in Antag is “presumably more derisked on the back of AMGN’s data. . . . We believe it shows this is viable and works, and looks good.”
MariTide’s data drop wasn’t exactly a slam dunk for Amgen, however, as the resulting weight loss of up to 20% on average at week 52 was at the lower end of investors’ expectations. Amgen’s shares tumbled more than 11% at market open on Nov. 26.
Antag is Versant’s third new obesity biotech of the year. In May, SixPeaks Bio—which Versant founded in 2022 to develop better therapies for weight loss—emerged from stealth with $30 million in series A financing and a strategic collaboration with AstraZeneca worth up to $80 million. And last month, the biotech investor unveiled Pep2Tango Therapeutics, a startup developing tetra-receptor agonist peptides that modulate GLP-1, GIP, amylin and calcitonin receptors to ideally lead to weight loss while preserving muscle mass.
