A Cincinnati biotech firm with heavy Medpace ties has raised $73 million in new capital. It ranks as the region’s largest funding effort of 2024.
CinRx Pharma, which oversees a seven-company drug portfolio, announced the financing May 30. The raise brings its total funding to date to $176 million.
Dr. Jon Isaacsohn, founder and CEO at CinRx, said the financing will allow it to accelerate growth across its current companies, while also bringing in new ones. The news follows the successful exit of CinRx's first portfolio company, CinCor, which went public in 2022, before selling to AstraZeneca in a $1.8 billion deal last year.
“This is an ongoing story for us,” Isaacsohn told me. “This $73 million raise will allow us to continue this cycle of bringing companies coming in, developing them, with exits that will continue indefinitely.”
Isaacsohn co-founded CinRx in 2015, and the firm operates using a hub-and-spoke approach. It looks to license or acquire compounds, forming companies around those it believes can be successful. The CinRx team, which includes scientific, technical and drug development experts, moves those compounds along the drug approval path with the intention of eventually exiting, or selling, them.
The firm is largely agnostic, although its found a sweet spot in the cardiometabolic renal space: CinCor, founded in 2018, developed a compound licensed from Swiss drug giant Roche to further treatments for hypertension and chronic kidney disease. Two of its current portfolio companies are GI treatments, including CinDome, which in mid-May closed a $40 million financing extension, part of a $59 million Series B raise. CinFina Pharma, respectively, is developing a pipeline of four obesity therapies, in-licensed from Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals.
CinRx owns 100% of CinFina now but is looking at bringing in a new set of investors as the company starts to garner “a tremendous amount of attention,” Isaacsohn said.
Isaacsohn said CinRx is also “constantly on the hunt” for new opportunities. In 2023, it evaluated more than 100 candidates. He said the firm is “very close” to bringing in new drugs and new companies. It could even expand with immunology-based entities.
“There has to be an unmet medical need. That is always our starting point,” he said.
CinCor's sale to AstraZeneca helped solidify CinRx's reputation, Isaacsohn said. He declined to disclose the financial return from the exit. But even with the higher profile, the $73 million financing included all previous investors, he said.
The round included a pool of high-net-worth individuals, many with deep biotech expertise, Isaacsohn said. The raise catapults CinRx to No. 4 on the list of region’s top-funded startups behind Enable Injections, 80 Acres Farms and Astronomer. If including investments made into its various subsidiaries like CinDome, Isaacsohn said the firm has brought in around $400 million.
Locally, CinRx’s investor pool includes Medpace Investors LLC, or MPI, an investment arm owned by the company’s employees, including its top executives.
Several CinRx team members – including Isaacsohn – have originated from Medpace, a Madisonville-based clinical research organization. CinRx is based on the Medpace campus and often uses Medpace to develop the drugs it brings in-house.
CinRx currently is a team of 25. He said the firm is constantly looking to hire.
“We're interested in expanding our staff base and keeping the whole concept moving,” he said. “There's a lot happening here, and we want to keep it that way.”
