Tectonic Therapeutic, Inc.

Plus, news about Tectonic Therapeutic, Molecular Partners and Arcus Biosciences: EnGene snags $60M: The Boston and Montreal gene therapy biotech raised the private placement from new and current investors a month after giving an early look at bladder cancer data . It’s the second big private placement for the biotech since it went public via a SPAC last fall. — Kyle LaHucik AbbVie partners again with Gedeon Richter: The companies have worked together for nearly two decades, developing CNS medicines like the antipsychotic Vraylar, and now plan to collaborate on more neuropsychiatric drugs. The Budapest-based pharma company gets $25 million upfront in the new pact. — Kyle LaHucik Tim Springer buys more shares of Tectonic Therapeutic: A repeat biotech builder and co-founder of Tectonic, Springer bought $10 million worth of shares from Atlas Ventures this week, according to an SEC filing . He owns about 31% of the company, which went public via a reverse merger this summer. — Kyle LaHucik Molecular Partners prices $20M offering: The Swiss biotech said the raise from HBM Healthcare Investments and other investors will close next week, and the process will support its radiopharma pipeline. — Kyle LaHucik Arcus Biosciences touts data from HIF-2a inhibitor in kidney cancer: The company shared Phase 1/1b data for casdatifan showing 81% of patients experienced disease control with either a partial response or stable disease. Other data demonstrated that 34% of patients experienced an objective response. It’s planning to start a Phase 3 trial of casdatifan in the first half of next year. The study is also enrolling another arm of patients to try out a combination of Arcus’ drug and Exelixis’ Cabometyx. — Katherine Lewin

A fusion of this year’s buzziest biotech trends — artificial intelligence and obesity drugs — is the focus of a new startup backed with $53.5 million from biotech investors Versant Ventures and DCVC, Endpoints News has learned. The startup, called Fable Therapeutics, has been operating in stealth for nearly three years. It’s based on research from co-founder and chief technology officer Philip Kim, a scientist at the University of Toronto and an early pioneer in the now booming field of using AI to create proteins never before seen in nature . Fable is building on Kim’s diffusion models — the type of AI used to generate fanciful images from text prompts — to make protein therapies, mainly antibodies but also peptides to potentially create new obesity medicines that go far beyond what existing GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic and Zepbound, and even their successors, can do. Fable CEO Geoff MacKay — who joined the startup just months before his prior company, gene therapy developer Avrobio, halted all drug development last summer — told Endpoints that he thinks AI will give Fable an “unfair advantage” in creating a “generation three of this exploding obesity market.” The startup is developing drugs that go “beyond basic weight loss” and help patients improve their basal metabolic rate, bone density, insulin sensitivity and strength, MacKay said. He thinks such drugs could be used in combination with existing or improved weight loss drugs to address the comorbidities of obesity and the unwanted effects of GLP-1 drugs, such as loss of muscle. MacKay wouldn’t name any of the targets that Fable is focused on or say when its drugs will enter clinical trials, but he expects to have development candidates for multiple programs in 2025. The startup also has four small research partnerships with pharma companies, but he couldn’t disclose the details. Kim is a highly-cited biologist and machine learning scientist, but he admits that he was initially skeptical about using AI to make proteins until one of his students showed him early results in 2017. It was “mind-blowing,” he said. “The strongest zealot is the converted skeptic.” Since then, he’s racked up a long list of firsts at the intersection of AI and proteins. He was the first to publish generative models for protein backbones in 2017, the first to make a graph neural network for protein design in 2019, and the first to release a validated protein backbone diffusion model in 2022. AI for predicting protein structures and designing new ones was the subject of a Nobel Prize awarded to Kim’s competitors earlier this month. It’s also attracted immense investment, including a more than $1 billion launch for Xaira Therapeutics , a startup co-founded by Nobel winner David Baker ; nearly $750 million across several funding rounds for Generate:Biomedicines ; and a $142 million seed round for EvolutionaryScale . Fable’s comparatively modest $10 million seed round and $43.5 million Series A are intended to fund the company into 2026, MacKay said. The startup has a dozen machine learning scientists in Toronto and another dozen protein researchers in Boston. The specifics of how Fable is improving Kim’s technology, and how the startup will use it, are still under wraps. But like other startups in the field, MacKay has a bold vision for how AI will change antibody drug discovery and said it will help the company optimize multiple properties of proteins. “The first generation of the platform was pretty mixed, but already by the time we got to generation two, you could produce out-of-the-box hits,” he said.

Septerna, a developer of medicines that target a ubiquitous family of proteins, on Thursday priced a $288 million initial public offering that again showed investors support of biotechnology companies that have reached clinical testing.The company sold 16 million shares at $18 apiece, slightly above the $15 to $17 range it had set in a securities filing Monday. It also sold substantially more shares than originally expected, having boosted its offerings size hours before pricing. Shares of SEPN will begin trading Friday on the Nasdaq stock exchange.Prior to joining Nasdaq, the California company raised more than $200 million in private funding. Its early backers included Third Rock Ventures and Samsara BioCapital, while RA Capital Management led a Series B round in 2023.GPCRs, or G protein-coupled receptors, are something of a cellular jack of all trades, involved in a range of biological functions like energy metabolism and immune regulation. They have therefore been a popular target for drugs, accounting by one estimate for about one-third of all approved medicines.But that research productivity appeared to have plateaued when Septerna launched in 2021 with plans to address problems researchers had in isolating GPCRs and design drugs that could bind them.Most of the success has been around a relatively small number of these GPCRs, Jeff Finer, Septernas CEO, told BioPharma Dive in early 2023. Theres hundreds more that could be potential therapeutic opportunities.Septernas lead drug candidate, dubbed SEP-786, targets a GPCR implicated in hypoparathyroidism. It entered human testing last month, and the company expects to report data in the middle of 2025.Hypoparathyroidism is currently treated with a mix of daily injections and high-dose calcium supplements. The company theorizes its small molecule drug could help people with the condition normalize their calcium and phosphate levels, which, when low, can lead to seizures and renal failure.In a securities filing, Septerna indicated it plans to use approximately $117 million of the IPO proceeds to advance SEP-786, and another $37 million developing another drug called SEP-631, for chronic spontaneous urticaria and other mast cell conditions.The last GPCR-focused biotech to go public was Structure Therapeutics, which raised $161 million in Feb. 2023. Since then, its share price has gyrated on updates from the company for an obesity drug its developing.Other GPCR drugmakers, including Escient Pharmaceuticals and Tectonic Therapeutic, have raised sizable funds, though not as much as Septerna or Structure. Escient was acquired by Incyte in April, while Tectonic went public through a reverse merger in June.September and October have been busy months for biotech IPOs, with eight companies now having priced offerings on Nasdaq. Bicara Therapeutics offering was the largest of that group, with $315 million in proceeds. Overall, its the most active two-month stretch for biotech IPOs since the start of the year, according to BioPharma Dive data.Though there are fewer opportunities compared to the heydays of 2020 and 2021, investors still have plenty of capital to go around, said Jordan Saxe, the senior managing director of listing services at Nasdaq.Every IPO is certainly dual tracked in this environment, so they're looking at not only the clinical outcome of commercial opportunity, but also, the M&A opportunity, Saxe said ahead of Septernas pricing.Septernas raise is the 23rd biotech IPO this year. '