XyloCor Therapeutics bags US$17m in Series A financing

The Amsterdam-based company said it will primarily use the proceeds to advance its lead product XC001, licenced from Weill Cornell Medicine, to clinical Phase I trials starting next year and beyond. The gene therapy for treatment-refractive stable angina pectoris has been granted FDA fast track designation for clinical studies as it provides a one-time treatment for the improvement of exercise tolerance in patients with chronic angina that is refractory to standard medical therapy and not amenable to conventional revascularisation procedures including coronary artery bypass surgery, percutaneous coronary intervention and stents.

XC001 provides two gene therapy vectors to enable revascularisation, the cause in most angina cases, as well as cardio-differentiation: an adenoviral vector encoding VEGF and a lentiviral vector encoding transcription factors Gata4, Mef2c, and Tbx5.

Chronic angina pectoris or chest pain occurs when the heart muscle does not receive as much oxygen as it needs for the amount of work it is performing. It is usually due to coronary artery disease. Patients with chronic angina who become resistant to current standard of care, whether medical or surgical, are considered refractory and often become sedentary because of their symptoms, which in turn can exacerbate comorbidities causing further deterioration of their health status. Last year, Technavio projected the current US$9bn angina pectoris market to expand to US$14bn in 2021.

While CX001, is based on a 2013 patent from Xylocor's co-founder Ronald Crystal, a second gene therapy in discovery stage was patented by the companies second founder, Todd Rosengart, Baylor College of Medicine, in 2016. XC002 is being investigated for the in-situ regeneration of cardiac tissue from reprogrammed fibroblasts in patients with cardiac damage from heart attacks. Specifically, adult cardiac fibroblasts are reprogrammed into cardiomyocytes using viral vectors that harbor p63 shRNA and the transcription factors Hand2 or/and myocardin.

XyloCor is being led by ex-GSK executive Al Gianchetti who has more than 25 years of drug development and commercialization experience. In conjunction with the financing, XyloCor has expanded its Board of Directors. New board members include Fouad Azzam, PhD, MBA, General Partner, LSP and Alan Colowick, MD, MPH, Partner, Sofinnova. They will serve alongside existing Board members Glenn Batchelder, Executive Chairman; Todd Rosengart, MD, Founder and Advisor; and Al Gianchetti, XyloCor President and CEO. Ronald Crystal, MD, Founder and Advisor and John de Koning, PhD, Partner, LSP will participate as board observers.