German cancer biotech CatalYm has secured $150m in a Series D funding round following the recently announced data for its lead monoclonal antibody visugromab.
The company has centred its pipeline on drugs targeting GDF-15 or growth differentiation factor-15, which acts as a key regulator of immune resistance to cancer therapies. The company was in the news earlier this year, when it shared follow-up data of its drug visugromab showing efficacy in heavily pretreated patients.
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The new funding, led by Canaan Partners and Bioqube Ventures, is set to fund the company’s planned Phase IIb trial of visugromab in select checkpoint-naïve front-line and second-line treatment settings.
The drug has so far been studied in combination with Bristol Myers Squibb’s (BMS) anti-PD-1 drug Opdivo (nivolumab) in patients with non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), hepatocellular cancer, and urothelial cancer. CatalYm presented data from the ongoing GDFATHER Phase I/IIa trial (NCT04725474) that is testing this combination at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting held in Chicago, on 2 June.
Across all tumour types, patients who received visugromab showed an objective response rate of 16.7%. The average duration of response surpassed 15 months for NSCLC, and 14 months for urothelial cancer, with 77% of the patients’ responses still ongoing. These 90 patients were heavily pretreated and had experienced failed anti-PD-1 therapies in the past.
Anti PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor drugs, such as BMS’ Opdivo, enhance the immune system’s ability to fight cancer by blocking the PD-1 receptor on T cells, a checkpoint that normally helps keep immune responses in check. Cancer cells often exploit this pathway to avoid being attacked by the immune system.
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By GlobalDataElevated GDF-15 levels in cancers can cause anti-PD-1 drugs to fail by creating an immunosuppressive tumour environment that hinders T cell activation and recruitment, which visugromab is designed to target.
Checkpoint inhibitors have pulled in billions over the last few years. MSD’s PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor Keytruda (pembrolizumab) was the world’s top-selling drug last year, making $25bn. BMS’ Opdivo generated $9bn in the same year, as per the company financials. One of the reasons for the high sales is the drugs’ ability to be paired with other anti-cancer medicines.
In the announcement accompanying the funding, CatalYm’s CEO Phil L’Huillier said: “We continue to demonstrate visugromab’s potential to induce cancer remission depth and durability across multiple solid tumour indications, emphasising the substantial role that visugromab could play in a novel anti-cancer therapy regimen.”
