Merck is tasking a 10-person biotech to hunt for new human antibody candidates.
The drug giant will ship up to $838 million to the startup, called Infinimmune, in exchange for antibody candidates that are directed against undisclosed targets chosen by Merck. The companies didn’t disclose the upfront payment or the breakdown of the collaboration terms.
Infinimmune CEO and co-founder Wyatt McDonnell told
Endpoints News
that its approach starts off with building what’s comparable to an Excel spreadsheet with “millions of rows” of memory B cells, alongside information on what antibodies these cells help generate. Merck will provide the targets to find out which antibodies match with them.
Infinimmune spends about one week identifying antibodies that bind those targets. It takes about three months to get candidates prepared for animal and CMC studies, McDonnell said.
The memory B cells are from human blood and tissue samples. The startup runs its models locally on two four-year-old Nvidia chips, McDonnell added.
Juan Alvarez, Merck’s vice president of biologics discovery, said in a press release that this approach is a “compelling new way to access novel biology and promising therapeutic candidates.”
Lining up an alliance with one of the largest pharma companies serves as a major validation moment for Infinimmune. The company planted its roots in California in 2022 and has raised $22 million so far with a “very lean, focused team,” McDonnell said
.
That includes a $12 million seed round in 2022 that included VC firms Playground Global and Pear VC, as well as individuals such as
Ron Alfa
and
Jacob Becraft
.
Infinimmune also plans to send its internal pipeline into human testing next year, McDonnell said. The company’s lead candidate, IFX-101, is an inhibitor of
IL-22
for moderate to severe atopic dermatitis. It aims for quarterly or twice-yearly dosing versus more frequent administration of other medicines in the much-contested eczema field. Behind that, the fledgling biotech has ambitions of inhibiting
IL-13
,
APRIL
,
IL-17F
and other targets.
The Tuesday partnership announcement marks one of a few announced deals so far this year for Merck. Last week, the drugmaker signed a
$6.7 billion buyout
of leukemia biotech Terns Pharmaceuticals as it seeks to pad out its pipeline beyond its megablockbuster Keytruda.
McDonnell said he expects one or two more partnerships of the Merck scope for Infinimmune in the coming years. Discussions are underway with other biopharmas, he said.
