BOSTON– BAKX Therapeutics today announced it closed $25 million in a Series A fundraising led by AB Magnitude Ventures Group with Ipsen Pharma SA and Sherpa Healthcare Partners. The new funding will enable the company to drive its BAKX Activator Program into the clinic in hematologic malignancies and solid tumors and to advance additional targets for solid tumors and prevention of resistance. The financing comes on the heels of the company’s recent announcement of a partnership comprising up to $852 million in upfront and potential milestone payments with Ipsen, a global biopharmaceutical company, to research, develop, manufacture and commercialize the company’s lead candidate, BKX-001, as a potential treatment for leukemia, lymphoma and solid tumors.
Sree Kant, founder and CEO of BAKX Therapeutics, said, “BAKX brings together the world’s most comprehensive knowledge of the mitochondrial apoptosis pathway with industry leading structure-based drug design and computational drug discovery techniques. Our pro-apoptotic programs were developed on the innovative work of our scientific co-founders, Loren D. Walensky of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Evripidis Gavathiotis of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who are the world’s leading experts in pro-apoptotic BAX/BAK activation pathway. Together they uncovered novel methods for solving the unique challenges of exploiting conformationally dynamic proteins to induce cancer cell death while sparing healthy cells.”
Kant added, “Following on our collaboration with Ipsen announced in July, the new capital will support more rapid advancement into the clinic of our pipeline of novel therapeutic candidates for solid tumors and turbocharge the deployment of our computational platform to drug conformationally dynamic proteins in the mitochondrial apoptosis pathway. We are grateful to our investors who share our vision and are singularly focused on our aim to develop new therapeutics that successfully address for the first time high-value, well validated, apoptosis targets.”
“Many companies have focused on targeting the pro-survival proteins, Bcl-2, Bcl-xl and Mcl-1, which have been effective for treatment of certain leukemias. Unfortunately, they have limitations like resistance in hematological malignancies and inability to achieve dosing efficacy in solid tumors,” said Yibing Shan, Ph.D., founding managing director of AB Magnitude Ventures Group, who has also joined BAKX in the role of chief computational scientist. “BAKX instead is successfully activating pro-apoptotic proteins such as BAX and BAK using a combination of unsurpassed target and pathway knowledge, deep expertise in conformationally dynamic protein interactions, and new, highly innovative computational methodologies for identifying cryptic sites and simulating protein interactions in the membrane. I am excited to support the company in this round as well as drive the deployment of the BAKX computational drug discovery platform in the field of apoptosis.”
Philippe Lopes-Fernandes, executive vice president and chief business officer at Ipsen, said, “At Ipsen we believe great partnerships create great possibilities and our collaboration with BAKX is an example of this with our investment in the future of BAKX, alongside our collaboration on the BKX-001 program. We support and congratulate BAKX on raising additional capital as we work together to advance BKX-001 in what is a groundbreaking approach to inducing cancer cell death. We share BAKX’s ambition to bring this innovation to people living with cancer around the world.”
