A few months after emerging from stealth mode, a biotech in Durham has secured millions in new capital and entered its first major strategic partnership.
Avicenna Biosciences is working with Molecure, a small public biotech company based in Poland, in a strategic research collaboration aimed at discovering and developing novel small-molecule cancer drugs.
Avicenna has developed a machine learning-driven medicinal chemistry platform intended to make the process of identifying lead drug candidates faster, cheaper and more successful. As part of this agreement, Avicenna will use its technology to identify novel drug candidates with superior pharmaceutical properties that Molecure could potentially advance into clinical development.
The collaboration is focused on a specific target that regulates the stability of crucial proteins that are involved in pathways relevant for tumor suppression and immune response. The goal of the partnership is to identify at least one drug candidate for Molecure to move forward, but the companies are hoping for more, Avicenna CEO Christopher Meldrum said.
Molecure has some compounds for this target that have not made it to clinical development. Avicenna will use its technology to evaluate those compounds and find analogs that meet the drug design criteria. If the compounds meet an established success criteria, Molecure could choose to advance the drug candidates to clinical development.
"We're going to be the master architect hopefully designing the compounds," said Thomas Kaiser, a founder and chief scientific officer of Avicenna.
The companies declined to provide financial details of the arrangement. But Avicenna is in line for an upfront fee and research funding that is contingent on the generated compounds meeting the agreement's established success criteria. Avicenna would also be eligible for license fees and a share of future revenue from any drug candidates that Molecure chooses to develop and commercialize as part of this agreement.
The research payments will provide Avicenna with additional financing to advance its own pipeline, alongside funding the company has raised. Avicenna — which was founded in 2020 but emerged publicly this year — has raised $20.5 million since its formation. The latest financing activity includes about $6 million of follow-on capital from existing investors, which Avicenna disclosed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in July.
Aside from the financial component, this sort of agreement provides validation of Avicenna's technology. The company knows its technology works from its own internal use, but this is a chance to demonstrate its capabilities externally.
The company was founded by Chief Scientific Officer Thomas Kaiser and Vice President of Informatics Pieter Burger, who met while working at the Liotta Research Group at Emory University. Kaiser and Burger in 2020 formed Avicenna with Meldrum, an entrepreneur-in-residence at DCVC Bio, a California-based venture capital firm.
Avicenna had operated stealthy over the past few years until the recent publication of a paper in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling that showed the company's technology can be used to accelerate the lead optimization process in drug discovery. This is the final stage of drug discovery, during which researchers identify lead drug candidates to advance further into development.
With its existing capital, Avicenna is in position to move its first program through the remaining pre-clinical work and into an initial clinical trial next year. As it advances its own pipeline, Avicenna could take on additional research collaborations as the company has had discussions with other potential partners.
This interest in the company's technology speaks to a broader challenge that drug developers face in turning a promising compound into a candidate ready for clinical trials, Meldrum said.
"It speaks to the problem where people optimize for potency ... but there is a long way between a lead compound and getting into a clinic," Meldrum said.
