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| Aduro CEO Stephen Isaacs |
With the ink still drying on a $365 million deal to in-license rights to a therapeutic cancer vaccine and immunotherapy tech at Aduro BioTech, J&J ($JNJ) is back with the news that it is also helping to bankroll the company's research work, jumping into a syndicate which has pledged $55 million to fuel an advanced drug study.
J&J Development Corp. joined Morningside and a few other unnamed investors in coming up with the round, which will be used to pay for an ongoing Phase IIb study in metastatic pancreatic cancer while the biotech plots new work on mesothelioma and high-grade glioma.
Berkeley-based Aduro has now raised a total of $84 million in equity investments to back its oncology work, which has produced some promising mid-stage data. The biotech has been using a failed cancer vaccine in combination with a lead drug--CRS-207--which was designed to kick up a T-cell attack by engineering it to express the antigen mesothelin, which the biotech notes is overexpressed in a slate of cancers including mesothelioma and pancreatic, non-small cell lung, ovarian and gastric cancers.
It's been a busy year for the Bay Area biotech. Back in January the biotech said that a combination of GVAX--a failed cancer vaccine it obtained from BioSante--along with one of its own experimental therapies more than doubled the survival rate of one group of patients compared to an arm that received GVAX alone. GVAX was pretty much abandoned after it decisively failed a 2008 study, an early harbinger for the weak results that have plagued other cancer vaccines in the pipeline. Quite a few investigators, though, believe there's enough activity to justify combination approaches.
That appears to be J&J's approach. The pharma giant in-licensed rights to GVAX for prostate cancer, a field which the company has put in its R&D spotlight, with an approval for Zytiga and work on a second-gen drug bought in through the Aragon acquisition. It also agreed to in-license therapeutic candidates from Aduro's platform, which uses live-attenuated double deleted Listeria monocytogenes strains to spawn the antigens needed to provoke an immune system attack on cancer.
J&J has a history of buying out the cancer drug developers it likes, a strategy highlighted by billion-dollar deals for Cougar and Aragon. And one of the venture backers raised the potential here of partnering Aduro's approach with a checkpoint inhibitor program, one of the hottest fields in oncology.
"Aduro's immunotherapy platforms have the potential to transform the treatment of cancer," said Gerald Chan, founder of Morningside, in a statement. "Combining the complementary mechanisms of action of the checkpoint inhibitors with Aduro's product candidates, which are designed to activate immunity, may make an enormous difference in the lives of cancer patients."
Stephen Isaacs, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Aduro, noted that "ultimately, our goal is to provide cancer patients with more effective, less toxic therapeutic alternatives through novel immunotherapies."
- here's the release