Ovid Therapeutics has taken another leap forward in its quest to treat seizures and rare brain disorders, buying into a clinical-stage Rock2 inhibitor from a biotech led by Sam Waksal, Ph.D.
Ovid is handing over $10 million in series A equity to Graviton Bioscience in exchange for a Rock2 inhibitor, GV101, gearing up for a phase 2 trial in patients with brainstem cavernous malformations, according to an announcement Monday. Graviton is also granting Ovid access to a library of other small molecule Rock2 inhibitors for Ovid to pluck and develop in the future. Waksal, whose enigmatic career has included leading Sanofi-bought Kadmon, said the deal terms make sense for both companies.
“Hopefully we will get [GV101] into the market after our phase 2 study,” said Waksal. “On top of it, the royalties are significant...and that’s what we care about.” As a punctuation point, Waksal called Rock2 "one of the targets of the century."
Ovid will fund development costs while working alongside Graviton through phase 2 development of GV101 and other assets that are checked out from the library. If and when an asset moves into phase 3 development, Ovid will work independently and have sole commercialization responsibility.
For Ovid CEO Jeremy Levin, the deal makes good on the biotech's long-stated business development ambitions. Ovid has spent the last year working through a reconfiguration of its pipeline. In February 2022, Ovid passed off an Angelman’s syndrome treatment to Healx that had failed to outperform placebo in a phase 2 trial. A month later a fifth of its staff were laid off to save additional capital with Levin saying at the time that the company was interested in “disciplined transactions” focused on small molecule and genetic epilepsy targets.
But it's Ovid’s 2021 out-licensing deal with Takeda that may have the most impact on near-term development. The Japanese Big Pharma signed a biobuck-heavy pact for Ovid’s soticlestat that is currently in phase 3 trials with regulatory filings planned for 2024. Levin said if those filings are successful, Ovid stands to gain $660 million in new milestone payments, which could help pay for the biotech's preclinical candidates. The biotech reported in March that it was “evaluating business development opportunities” for its non-core nucleic acid programs.
“We will likely take a hard look at all of our programs internally and decide where our best expertise lies, which at this stage is definitely small molecules, rare diseases of the brain and novel targets,” said Levin.
As for GV101, a crossover multiple ascending dose study is slated to start next month, according to Waksal, who said the company developed a new formulation of the drug that should make it more bioavailable. The best case scenario, Waksal says, is being prepared for phase 2 studies by the fall.
Waksal has led privately-held Graviton since 2020 according to his LinkedIn profile, four years after the sale of Kadmon. He’s barred from serving as an officer at any public company after being sentenced to 87 months in prison in 2003 for insider trading while leading ImClone’s Erbitux. When Kadmon went public in 2016, Waksal walked away with a lucrative $25 million severance package.