Vancouver-based biotech Zymeworks has raised US$61.5 million to support clinical trials for drugs aimed at training the body to target cancerous cells.
Zymeworks CEO Dr. Ali Tehrani told Business in Vancouver his company’s Azymetric product, an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), helps the process of “super-charging the body’s immune system to deal with cancer.”
Cancer is a particularly complex disease to treat since the immune system has difficulty differentiating between healthy cells and cancerous cells.
Tehrani said Zymeworks is trying to change that through the upcoming clinical trials.
“All of us that are in the business of super-charging antibodies, tailoring them and tuning them, are trying to figure out a way to engineer instructions to the body’s immune system so that it’s able to differentiate (between healthy) cells and cells that have gone rogue,” Tehrani said.
Trials are expected to begin later in the year. If all goes well, Tehrani said the product would be on shelves by 2021 at the earliest.
While US$61.5 million is a hefty sum, the CEO said guidelines required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to get these products approved make clinical trials an especially expensive endeavour.
“None of this really is about salaries, none of this is really about management. This is about the process which is meant to be very expensive to protect patients,” he said.
In addition to manufacturing costs, patients must also be provided with top-of-the-line care while clinicians and experts review the findings.
“This costs a lot of money,” Tehrani said.
The fundraising round was co-led by BDC Capital and Lumira Capital.
But this isn’t the largest sum Zymeworks has handled.
In 2011, the privately held company signed a contract with American pharmaceutical giant Merck (NYSE:MRK) worth up to US$187 million.
But Tehrani said the financing round was split evenly between Canadian and U.S. institutions.
“There’s this notion you always have to go to the U.S. but we’re showing Canadian institutions are quite capable of helping companies grow,” he said.
In fact, Zymeworks is doing the same for other local biotechs.
On Friday (January 8) the firm announced it had made an undisclosed equity investment in Vancouver-based Kairos Therapeutics, which also specializes in ADCs.
Tehrani said Zymeworks looked at 170 other companies across the globe before determining Kairos was the best fit to address a gap in its research and development capabilities.
Part of the deal includes an option for the two biotechs to merge.
But Tehrani added none of the US$61.5 million raised in the funding round was going towards the equity stake in Kairos.
“The strategic deal with Kairos is independent, it comes from a separate strategy,” he said.
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