Zentera Therapeutics has its eyes on a public offering in Hong Kong next year, but first the biotech has snagged a $75 million series B to advance two clinical assets and a third preclinical one.
The Shanghai-based biopharmaceutical reeled in the investment from founding backers OrbiMed Advisors Asia and Tybourne Capital Management alongside Avidity Partners, Casdin Capital and more than half a dozen others. Zentalis Pharmaceuticals set up Zentera as a joint venture last May with $20 million to bring cancer therapies to China.
The fresh funds will help Zentera bring forth two programs already in the clinic: a WEE1 inhibitor that aims to prevent damaged DNA from being repaired in solid tumor cancer cells as well as an oral selective estrogen receptor degrader for the treatment of ER+/HER2-breast cancer.
The WEE1 inhibitor is "akin to what's probably more well known in the space as PAPR inhibitors," Zentera CEO Anthony Sun, M.D., said in an interview with Fierce Biotech. Merck and AstraZeneca's Lynparza is a notable PARP for patients with ovarian cancer.
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Zentera's WEE1 inhibitor, being developed with partner Zentalis, shrank tumors in a stage 4 ovarian cancer patient, a stage 4 colorectal cancer patient, one with non-small cell lung cancer and two patients with uterine serous carcinoma, according to phase 1 data presented in April.
Zentera also has a third asset in the works with Zentalis that will be in the clinic later this year.
Sun is CEO of both Zentera and Zentalis. The CEO said he decided to establish Zentera as a joint venture so Zentalis could "control the quality of the clinical trials and the science that's being conducted" while allowing Zentera to become independent and not be "hamstrung" as a subsidiary.
With the series B funds raised Monday, Zentera has the cash on hand to in-license oncology products outside China from other biotechs or pharmas in the U.S., Europe, Japan or elsewhere, Sun said. The biopharma will also develop its own pipeline in-house, the CEO added.
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Then, it's on to the public markets. Zentera will likely go public in Hong Kong sometime in 2022 given the sizable investor pool there, including an increasing level of large U.S. investors, Sun said. The market is attracting a growing body of Asian-focused biotechs that have listed there in the past five years, the CEO said.
"I think the time has come for Hong Kong to be a natural listing location for Asian-focused companies in biotech," Sun said.
Sun has recent experience pulling off an IPO amid rocky times. Zentalis went public on the Nasdaq in April 2020 just as the pandemic was picking up speed in the U.S.