Orum Therapeutics announced today that it closed an $84 million Series B financing for its targeted protein degraders for treating cancer.
Boston-based Orum’s funding round includes a previously announced $30 million financing, plus another $54 million in new funds led by IMM Investment and joined by new investors KDB Investment and Atinum, among others. Existing investors Intervest and KB Investment, among others, also participated.
According to a news release, Orum plans to use the proceeds to advance its lead therapeutic candidates into clinical trials, explore payload chemistries to develop additional payloads that modulate the ubiquitin pathway, plus for other general corporate purposes.
Orum’s antibody neodegrader conjugate (AnDC) platform uses novel targeted protein degrader payloads combined with the precise tumor cell delivery mechanisms of antibodies to generate antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) to treat cancer.
“AnDCs leverage the strengths of both targeted protein degraders and ADCs while overcoming the limitations of each modality. Advances in ADC therapies have been hampered by a lack of diversity in payloads with a novel mechanism of action to inhibit tumor cell growth, and small molecule degraders do not possess tissue specificity,” Orum CSO Peter U. Park said in the release. “The team at Orum has created a unique set of payloads that can target intracellular proteins for degradation. These first-in-class targeted ADC protein degraders have the potential to deliver precise and catalytic tumor-killing action to improve cancer treatment.”
The funding will help to advance the new class of ADC payloads developed by Orum. These neodegraders specifically degrade intracellular target proteins within cancer cells through the E3 ubiquitin ligase pathway. When conjugated to antibodies, neodgraders are designed to be delivered specifically to cancer cells and degrade the intracellular target protein and cause tumor cell death.
“We are grateful for the support of our new and returning investors as we continued to pursue our mission of developing new therapeutics to target ‘undruggable’ proteins and help patients with limited treatment options,” Orum founder & CEO Sung Joo Lee said. “We believe our AnDC platform overcomes the lack of diversity in ADC payloads and the limitations of current targeted protein degrader technologies.
“With encouraging preclinical data on our two lead therapeutic candidates, we are excited to use the proceeds to continue to advance our first-in-class tumor-directed targeted protein degraders into the clinic for the treatment of cancer.”
