Half a year after toppling Genentech’s eye medicine giant Vabysmo in an early trial, Texas biotech Ollin Biosciences has lassoed a $330 million series B to push its winning contender through a multi-trial phase 3 gauntlet.
The round was spearheaded by TCGX and ARCH Venture Partners, with Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz joining in alongside Blackstone Multi-Asset Investing, Commodore Capital, RA Capital Management and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, among others.
With designs on launching its VEGF/Ang2 bispecific antibody OLN324 into at least three phase 3 trials, Ollin needed substantial backing, co-founder and CEO Jason Ehrlich told Fierce Biotech.
Two trials will focus on the lead indication of diabetic macular edema, where OLN324 topped Vabysmo in an earlier phase 1b trial, while at least one other will focus on wet age-related macular degeneration, where the two competitors were more equally matched. These trials should launch later this year, Ollin announced in a June 24 release.
“We're really quite thrilled with both the enthusiasm and the support of these investors and the quality of the investor syndicate that we put together,” Ehrlich told Fierce.
“Ollin is advancing product candidates that have the potential to significantly change the treatment paradigm in vision-threatening diseases,” Cariad Chester, managing partner of TCGX and new member of Ollin’s board, said in the release. OLN324’s data position it “as a best-in-class therapy for one of the largest and most important unmet medical needs in ophthalmology.”
The enthusiasm that led to the oversubscribed fundraise stems from OLN324’s potential to usurp Vabysmo’s place atop the retinal disease market. Ehrlich understands how to topple titans, as he himself helped lead Vabysmo’s development during a decade-long run at Genentech. Vabysmo’s superior disease control enabled it to overtake Regeneron’s Eylea, the Ollin CEO told Fierce, which itself was an improvement over Genentech’s earlier drug Lucentis—which Ehrlich also worked on.
With Vabysmo and Eylea pulling in $5.3 billion and $4.4 billion in 2025, respectively, Ehrlich thinks there’s plenty of room in the overall $15 billion global market for OLN324 to shine.
And OLN324 is only one—albeit massive—part of Ollin’s story. The other is OLN102, a potentially first-in-class drug for thyroid eye disease that the biotech hopes to bring into a phase 1 trial this year.
OLN102 is poised to challenge Amgen’s Tepezza, the only approved medicine for thyroid eye disease. While Tepezza targets the insulin-like growth factor 1 receptor (IGF-1R), OLN102 is designed to hit both IGF-1R and thyroid stimulating hormone receptor (TSHR).
“There's really interesting biology around the connection between the TSH receptor and the IGF-1 receptor in terms of the pathobiology of the disease,” Ehrlich outlined. “We're quite optimistic that the dual targeting will offer some unique clinical outcomes for patients.”
Both OLN324 and OLN102 came to Ollin via Chinese biotechs, and Ehrlich said Ollin is continuing to scour the globe for new innovation to bring into the company’s burgeoning pipeline. He expects more molecules to join the portfolio in the coming years, he said.
Long a point of contention for the U.S. industry, the rise of China biotech has since sparked efforts to curtail the ability for American companies to buy innovation from the Asian nation.
“What's most important is removing barriers to innovation in the United States,” Ehrlich said of these efforts, highlighting the recently announced initiative from the Department of Health and Human Services to speed up phase 1 trials as a positive example. “The most important thing for us is to have a regulatory environment in the U.S. that continues to support really efficient drug development, while keeping a high bar for safety and efficacy for American patients.”
Ollin is also on a similar trajectory to other companies that have recently speedrun through the typical biotech lifestyle, such as cardio outfit Kardigan. With a late 2025 launch and $430 million already in the bank, could the ophthalmology specialist be the next biotech to hit the public markets?
“A public financing would not be inconsistent with what you're seeing with other companies at the stage of late development that we are now at,” Ehrlich said. “The key thing is having assembled the syndicate that gives us a lot of future flexibility as we continue to grow the company.”
Another direction that flexibility could bend is toward an acquisition, a la AbbVie’s recent $10.9 billion buy of Apogee Therapeutics.
“That would be hard to say no to,” the CEO said with a smile.