Within a week of leaving Dermira after the dermatology medicines company sold to Eli Lilly for $1.1 billion in January 2020, Luis Peña was setting up Evommune with the goal of in-licensing programs he worked on while at Dermira. The biotech now has secured $83 million to bring forth those programs.
Evommune will use the series A financing to advance three programs the biotech in-licensed from Dermira in January (PDF) and another program it's collaborating (PDF) on with Axcelead Drug Discovery Partners. As part of the in-licensing with Lilly's Dermira, the Big Pharma has a "very small percentage" equity stake in Evommune, Peña, who is CEO and president, said in an interview with Fierce Biotech.
Peña co-founded Evommune with Chief Medical Officer Eugene A. Bauer, M.D., former dean of Stanford's School of Medicine. The two helped found Dermira in 2010 and, while there, worked on a series of programs that they kept under wraps while public eyes were focused on lebrykizimab.
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With Lilly focused on lebrykizimab, Peña wanted to immediately set up Evommune so he could regain those projects he and Bauer worked on, the CEO said. They picked up $12.5 million in seed funding in November 2020 (PDF) and have since in-licensed multiple assets.
The series A will bankroll proof-of-concept studies for Evommune's first three programs, Peña said. The first will enter the clinic by the end of this year and will have a data readout around this time next year, and the second program will enter the clinic by the end of 2022, the CEO said.
Evommune's first program is a topical anti-inflammatory focused on rosacea and atopic dermatitis and the second program is a topical meant to treat psoriasis, with the potential for also working in inflammatory bowel disease, chronic graft-versus-host disease, among others.
The third program, also in-licensed from Dermira, was formed through a partnership with Evotec and is referred to internally as "Tylenol for itch," Peña said. The oral treatment aims to block itching within a matter of hours, which is critical given that is the worst symptom reported by patients with chronic inflammation, the CEO said.
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Evommune's fourth program is an oral anti-inflammatory treatment formed through a partnership with Japanese drug discovery company Axcelead. Peña said the biotech is hoping to develop the treatment as a safer alternative to JAK inhibitors, which have run into multiple safety issues, leading the FDA to expand safety warnings and treatment restrictions last week.
With four in-licensed assets already in the pipeline, Peña said the Los Altos, California biotech isn't stopping any time soon in its "evolution in immunology" mission, hence the name. Evommune expects to keep adding at least one program to its pipeline each year.
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“One of the great things about the current environment is that there’s a lot of discovery companies that you can partner with and especially companies that are utilizing artificial intelligence," Peña said. He pointed to UK-based Exscientia as one example of a drug discovery company Evommune is interested in working with.
Andera Partners, LSP and Pivotal bioVenture Partners contributed to the series A.