NEW YORK – MBrace Therapeutics on Tuesday announced it raised $85 million in a Series B funding round to advance its lead antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) candidate into clinical studies.
The funding round was led by TPG's life sciences fund, TPG Life Sciences Innovations. Other investors in the round included new investors Avidity Partners and Cowen Healthcare Investments, as well as existing investors Venrock and Alta Partners. In conjunction with the financing, Carolyn Ng, business unit partner with TPG LSI, and Monal Mehta, a therapeutics analyst at Avidity Partners, will join the company's board of directors. The firm also added Christopher LeMasters, CEO of XinThera, to its board as an independent director.
The funding will be used to support clinical development of its pipeline, including the first-in-human clinical trial in solid tumors of MBrace's lead investigational ADC, MBRC-101, which targets EphA5 receptor tyrosine kinase. This target is present in several cancer types, including breast, non-small cell lung, colorectal, gastric, and pancreatic cancers. MBrace CEO Isan Chen said in a statement that the trial is expected to begin before the end of 2023.
A company spokesperson said in an email that the firm is also developing a diagnostic to select patients for treatment and will be conducting a retrospective analysis of patients' tumor samples in the trial. The retrospective analysis will focus on EphA5 expression, but patients will not be required to have tumors expressing EphA5 to enroll in the study.
The trial will enroll several tumor-specific cohorts, including cohorts for NSCLC; triple-negative or hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer; and other solid tumors.
MBrace, based in San Diego, has another undisclosed ADC in the discovery phase. The firm developed its candidates using its Selection of Phage-displayed Accessible Recombinant Targeted Antibodies, or SPARTA, antibody discovery platform. The platform uses in vitro screening of tumor targets against a naïve human antibody library followed by in vivo testing to select antibodies based on their tumor-homing capabilities.