NEW YORK – Abdera Therapeutics officially launched on Thursday, announcing it has raised $142 million in private funding to advance its radiopharmaceutical platform to treat cancers, including small cell lung cancers and other solid tumors expressing the delta-like ligand 3 (DLL3) protein.
The new firm, which is jointly based in Menlo Park, California, and Vancouver, Canada, is hoping to file an investigational new drug application with the US Food and Drug Administration in 2024 to begin evaluating its DLL3-targeting radiopharmaceutical in clinical trials.
Abdera's ROVEr platform, which stands for radio-optimized vector engineering, is designed to allow the company to design new antibody-based radiopharmaceuticals that target antigens with high affinity and deliver therapeutic radioisotopes to target expressing cancer cells while sparing healthy cells. The therapies are designed with an element to allow for tunable pharmacokinetic properties. The firm wants to use both alpha- and beta-emitting radioactive isotopes, and to differentiate its treatments from radiopharmaceutical approaches that target either small ligands or large proteins, neither of which, in Abdera's view, have an ideal therapeutic index.
The company raised its $142 million through series A and series B financing rounds. Versant Ventures and Amplitude Ventures led the Series A round, with participation from Northview Ventures, AdMare BioInnovations, and AbCellera. VenBio Partners led the series B round, with participation from the existing series A investors and new investors Viking Global Investors, Qiming Venture Partners USA, and RTW Investments.
"Radiopharmaceuticals hold the potential to transform the treatment of cancer, but the ability to finely tune radioisotope delivery to the tumor, while sparing healthy tissue, remains a major challenge for this class of drugs," Abdera CEO and President Lori Lyons-Williams said in a statement. "Abdera's ROVEr platform enables the design of antibody-based radiopharmaceuticals that are ideally suited to specific cancer targets with optimized PK properties to pair with a radioisotope of choice and maximize therapeutic impact."
Beyond the DLL3-targeting program, Abdera says it is developing a pipeline of radiopharmaceuticals for cancers with undisclosed targets.