Led by new investor Google Ventures, it is one of 2023’s larger fundraising efforts and comes less than a year after a $4 billion deal with Takeda for a Nimbus autoimmune disease treatment.
Pictured: Illustration of money exchanging hands/iStock, MagicVectorCreation
Nimbus Therapeutics announced Wednesday that it raised $210 million to advance its next wave of small-molecule medicines, making it one of 2023’s larger rounds of private financing.
The Boston biotech company will be putting the cash towards a variety of initiatives including its ongoing clinical development of NDI-101150, a hematopoietic progenitor kinase 1 inhibitor in patients with solid tumors. New programs are targeting Werner syndrome helicase and an as-yet undisclosed immune target, as well as novel targeted therapies that activate adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK) to treat metabolic disorders in a nearly $500 million deal with Eli Lilly.
This is not Nimbus’ first successful round of fundraising. The company raised $125 million in late 2022, bringing in Bain Life Sciences and SV Health Investors.
The latest funding drive announcement on Wednesday brought in some big new investors as well as some old standbys. In particular, the funding round was co-led by Google Ventures—a new investor to Nimbus—as well as existing investors SR One and Atlas Venture. The funding round also brought in another unnamed investor, which Nimbus described in the announcement as “a U.S.-based life sciences-focused fund,” alongside existing investors including Bain Capital Life Sciences, BVF Partners, Gates Frontier, Lightstone Ventures, Pfizer Ventures, RA Capital Management and SV Health Investors.
It’s one of the bigger investments in biopharma this year. The industry has seen significant ups and downs in recent years: 2021 was a banner year, building off enthusiasm for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, before a serious drop-off occurred in 2022.
This fundraising round marks the latest good news for Nimbus. At the close of 2022, Phase IIb data for NDI-034858, an allosteric tyrosine 2 kinase inhibitor being developed to treat autoimmune disease, showed that it had met its primary efficacy endpoint—a statistically significant increase in the number of patients hitting a 75% improvement in skin lesions.
Two weeks later, Takeda announced it would be buying both the Nimbus therapy and wholly-owned subsidiary Nimbus Lakshmi. Nimbus CEO Jeb Keiper said at the time the results demonstrated NDI-034858 had “the potential to be a best-in-class medicine in multiple disease areas.”
The initial $4 billion deal could be worth as much as $6 billion: two milestone payments of $1 billion each kick in at $4 billion and $5 billion in annual net drug sales. Keiper told BioSpace at the time that Nimbus’ focus was on designing breakthrough medicines before partnering with multinational pharma companies to bring them to commercialization. They inked a similar deal in 2016, when Gilead Sciences acquired the company’s lead clinical program, firsocostat, in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis.
Connor Lynch is a freelance writer based in Ottawa, Canada. Reach him at lynchjourno@gmail.com.
