WATERTOWN, Mass. & GOLDEN, Colo.– Nexo Therapeutics today emerged from stealth with a $60 million Series A financing led by founding investor Versant Ventures with participation from New Enterprise Associates and Cormorant Asset Management. The company also announced a multi-year strategic research collaboration with The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the details of which are described in a separate announcement.
The financing supports Nexo’s platform that combines the power of covalent ligand discovery and chemical biology to unlock a pipeline of novel cancer therapies directed against previously intractable targets.
“For many cancer patients there are no therapies that target the fundamental drivers of their disease,” said Andrew Phillips, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Nexo. “At Nexo, we are leveraging innovations in covalent chemistry and chemical biology to enable targeting these fundamental drivers. Our deep expertise in cancer biology and medicinal chemistry will allow us to efficiently advance therapies that provide new treatment options.”
Many of the most compelling targets in oncology present significant hurdles for conventional approaches to ligand discovery, selectivity optimization and pharmacology. The reason is ligand discovery often relies on decades-old approaches, many of which struggle to find hits of sufficient quality. Even when there are identified starting points, it is hard to optimize for selectively, potency and pharmacological properties.
The Nexo platform systematically addresses each of the above issues by combining a chemistry engine with chemical biology capabilities.
The company’s chemistry engine, CODON (Covalent Discovery and Optimization), is tailored to solve challenges of ligand discovery. CODON combines a proprietary library that leverages chemical diversity and innovative covalent chemistries with scalable biochemical and in-cell proteomics. This allows the company to identify promising hit compounds and conduct rapid optimization to produce compounds for in vivo studies.
Importantly, the CODON engine uses covalent fragments against all ligandable amnio acids, thus expanding beyond conventional approaches that are constrained to cysteine and enabling discovery against targets that have been refractory to prior approaches. Coupled with the scale and breadth of the internal library and both biochemical and in-cell mass spectrometry capabilities, Nexo will be able to pursue challenging, high-value targets.
Nexo’s chemical biology capability, INFINI-T (Informed Profile Before Initiation of Target), uses the power of chimeric fusion proteins to address target biology and pharmacology questions. The function of these chimeric proteins can be controlled by small molecules in cellular and in vivo models to generate detailed information about the required depth, duration and selectivity of target inhibition. Importantly, the INFINI-T platform provides target product profiles for medicinal chemistry well in advance of lead optimization. This is expected to decrease the time and capital needed to bring drug candidates to the clinic.
“The Nexo platform is a unique combination of capabilities that can be operated at scale and that offers potential to create effective treatments for cancer and other diseases,” said Carlo Rizzuto, Ph.D., managing director at Versant Ventures and a Nexo board member. “We are proud to lead this Series A financing and partner with the highly experienced Nexo team to create a pipeline of differentiated therapeutics.”
“We are excited to support Nexo’s bold vision,” said Ali Behbahani, M.D., general partner at NEA and a Nexo board member. “Cancer biology continues to provide promising but challenging targets that require innovative approaches, and we look forward to working with the team to translate recent discoveries into novel therapies.”
