January 5, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Millendo Therapeutics Inc. announced today that it had raised $62 million in a venture capital round, which it is using, partially, to buy rights to a drug from AstraZeneca plc .
The third item on Millendo’s agenda is the announcement of a new company name. Previously, the company was named Atterocor Inc. “I wanted a new name for the company,” said Julia Owens, Millendo president and chief executive officer, to Crain’s Detroit Business. “Atterocor was continually misspelled and mispronounced.”
Atterocor was founded in 2012 with $16 million in venture capital. It was a spinoff of the University of Michigan. Today’s $62 million financing was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and was joined by new investors Roche Venture Fund, Adams Street Partners, Altitude Life Science Ventures, Longwood Fund, and Renaissance Venture Capital Fund. Existing investors Frazier Healthcare Partners, Osage University Partners, 5AM Ventures, and the Regents of the University of Michigan under the Michigan Investment in New Technology Startup (MINTS) Program also joined in this round.
Millendo is investing much of the money in a licensing agreement with AstraZeneca for AZD4901 (now MLE4901), a Neurokinin 3 receptor (NK3R) antagonist to treat PCOS, the most common endocrine disease in women. Millendo picked up global rights to develop and commercialize the drug. It paid AstraZeneca an upfront payment, as well as committing to various developmental and commercial milestones. In addition, AstraZeneca has an equity stake in the company, details of which were not disclosed.
“We are committed to developing novel treatment options for patients with significant unmet medical needs and we believe that MLE4901, a first-in-class, first-in-disease, non-hormonal therapy, has tremendous potential in the treatment of PCOS, for which there are currently no approved therapies,” Owens said in a statement. “Our new company reflects our vision to develop a robust pipeline of endocrine therapeutics.”
PCOS stands for polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects between 4 and 8 percent to 15 to 20 percent of women worldwide, depending on which diagnostic definitions are being used. PCOS is a hormonal imbalance that often results in ovarian cysts, with symptoms such as acne, facial and body hair, hair loss, and a halt or increase of menstruation. It also increases the likelihood of diabetes because the hormone imbalance often causes insulin resistance.
Treatment for PCOS has typically been birth control pills or generic metformin, a drug that is used to treat diabetes or insulin resistance.
MLE4901 has already showed efficacy in a Phase IIa clinical trial with 65 women. The results of the trial showed a 52 percent drop in leutinizing hormones (LH), and a 29 percent drop in blood testosterone levels, after seven days of treatment. There were no serious side effects observed.
Millendo’s other focus is on adrenal cancer. It was originally spun off from the University of Michigan to push Phase I clinical trials of ATR-101 to treat adrenal cancer. One of the company’s founders, Raili Kerppola, died in 2013 at the age of 51 from stage-four adrenal cancer. It is a rare disease, with death often occurring within one year of diagnosis.
Adrenal cancer, also called adrenocortical carcinoma, is diagnosed in the U.S. in about 500 to 600 patients annually. About 1,000 patients in the U.S. are regularly treated for the disease.
Millendo is also investigating ATR-101 in nonhuman trials in congenital adrenal hyperplasia and endogenous Cushing’s syndrome. The company hopes to have clinical proof of concept for those conditions sometime in 2016.
“This acquisition of MLE4901 combined with the new funding and our current programs around ATR-101,” said Owens in a statement, “put us on a new trajectory to build a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on multiple disease-modifying treatments for endocrine disorders caused by hormone dysregulation.”
