Artios Pharma raise €85m in Series B round

Existing investors Arix Bioscience, SV Health Investors, M Ventures, IP Group and AbbVie Ventures also participated in the oversubscribed Series B round financing. Two-year-old Artios Pharma has in-licenced its lead compound, which targets the DNA-directed DNA polymerase ? (POL?), from Cancer Research UK, which targets the DNA damage response (DDR). Tumours change their DDR pathways to allow mutations in their DNA so that they can evolve and adapt. According to the Oxford-based company, this is what makes cancers to overcome many current therapies.

DNA-directed DNA polymerase ? is a critical component of the Pol? alt-EJ pathway; the micro-homology mediated end joining (MMEJ) DNA repair pathway is involved in double-strand break repair. Pol? expression is low in normal tissues but it is up-regulated in a number of tumour types such as breast, ovarian, HNSCC and lung making POL? inhibition a promising approach to overcome therapy resistance in these indications.

Besides its preclinical POL? inhibitor, which Artios expects to be ready for clinical testing by 2020, the company has build a small-molecule pipeline targeting the remaining DDR pathways, which – in case of PARP inhibitors – has been demonstrated to selectively kill cancer cells through a concept known as ‘synthetic lethality’. DDR targeted products have the potential to be used as monotherapy or in combination with radio- or chemotherapy to help prevent cancers from reoccuring. 

Artios’ Pharma second licensed candidate drug targets a protein which has been identified as a novel DNA damage response target. It is recruited to sites of DNA damage, where it is required for lesion accessibility and to facilitate DNA repair. It is frequently over-expressed in multiple tumour types, giving an opportunity for the product to be used in a broad range of clinical settings. Furthermore, together with partners from Masaryk university, the company is seeking to target DNA nucleases involved in the DDR.

In conjunction with the Series B financing, Raphael Wisniewski from Andera Partners, Rene Kuijten from LSP and Barbara Dalton from Pfizer Ventures, will join the Board of Artios as directors and Florian Muellershausen from NVF will join as an observer. This financing follows a $36m Series A fundraise that was completed in September 2016.

Dr. René Kuijten, Managing Partner of LSP, was elected to join the Board of Artios as a director, following the transaction. Commenting on today’s announcement René Kuijten said: “LSP has worked with Artios’ team before at KuDOS (successfully sold to AstraZeneca) which developed Olaparib, the first approved PARP inhibitor and used in ovarian and breast cancer, creating a billion dollar market. We are very excited to support this proven management team once again as it seeks to build on its leading position in the DDR field by advancing its programmes into clinical development.”

Niall Martin, Chief Executive Officer of Artios added: “The oversubscribed Series B fundraise is a strong endorsement of our world-leading development pipeline and reflects the opportunity for DDR to yield new breakthrough oncology products.”

Artios Pharma was founded by SV Health Investors in 2016, is led by an experienced scientific and leadership team with proven expertise in DDR drug discovery. The company builds its know-how on  partnerships with Cancer Research UK, and with the National Centre for Biomolecular Research at Masaryk University.