Avere Therapeutics has burst onto the scene by securing a public listing via a reverse merger with NextCure, while stocking its pipeline with an IL-23 drug from Hansoh Pharmaceutical.
The combined company, which will list on the Nasdaq under the ticker “AVRX,” will be led by Avere's CEO Andrew Cheng, M.D., Ph.D. The Avere team was introduced to NextCure by wealth management firm Wedbush Securities, Cheng told Fierce, adding that the brittle bone disease biotech was an ideal partner because of its Nasdaq listing and “full support for our go-forward vision of the company.”
Cheng will oversee the combined company along with Avere's Chief Development Officer Kitty Yale and Chief Financial Officer William White, who together guided Akero Therapeutics from pre-IPO through to Novo Nordisk's purchase of the liver disease-focused company in October 2025.
Cheng noted that his team learned the importance of a “relentless focus on execution” through that process. “Investing early in robust manufacturing, regulatory planning and operational infrastructure reduces downstream risk and enables faster development as programs mature,” he said.
Along with its public listing, Avere now has a lead asset to focus on thanks to a $120 million upfront payment to China's Hansoh for an oral IL-23 therapy for inflammatory diseases dubbed AVR-001. The extended half-life of AVR-001 means it is designed to be administered weekly, and a phase 1b study by Hansoh in China suggested that the asset could hold its own against a daily first-gen oral inhibitor when it came to reducing psoriasis.
The deal also means Hansoh is eligible for up to $2.18 billion in milestone payments along with mid-single to low-double digit royalties should AVR-001 make it to market. Avere plans to take AVR-001 into a phase 2b psoriasis study next year, with a readout pencilled in for the first half of 2028.
That clinical roadmap—which extends to launching a phase 3 study in psoriasis and a phase 2b trial in ulcerative colitis—is being bankrolled by a $320 million private placement that the company also outlined this morning.
The combination of Hansoh's clinical data, the influx of fresh capital and immediate access to the public markets makes Avere “highly competitive in the emerging oral IL-23 market,” Cheng said in a statement.
Avere is jumping into an increasingly crowded IL-23 psoriasis space, where injectable blockbusters like AbbVie's Skyrizi and Johnson & Johnson's Tremfya are being challenged by a flurry of oral treatments. Bristol Myers Squibb's once-daily psoriasis drug Sotyktu earned FDA approval in 2022 and had its label expanded to psoriatic arthritis earlier this year, while J&J's Protagonist Therapeutics-partnered daily pill shared data that challenged BMS' dominance. In April, Jeffries analysts described Oruka's monthly injectable IL-23 treatment readout for psoriasis as an “outright win over Skyrizi” with blockbuster potential.
Avere's leadership are hoping that AVR-001's combination of weekly dosing with oral administration will allow it to carve out a chunk of the market.