A couple of months back, an Oxford startup iLoF accelerating drug discovery with AI, raised $4.1 million in funding. On the similar lines, Nimbus Therapeutics, a clinical-stage drug discovery company, has secured $125 million in private financing. Prior to this, the company raised $105 million in July 2021.
The round saw participation of new investors Bain Capital Life Sciences and SV Health Investors, along with existing investors, including Access Biotechnology, Atlas Venture, BVF Partners L.P., Bill Gates, Lightstone Ventures that invested in Indian delivery goliath Dunzo, Pfizer Ventures, RA Capital Management and SR One.
Completion of clinical trials
The investment will support the completion of the ongoing Phase 2b clinical trials of NDI-034858, Nimbus’ oral allosteric tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2) inhibitor, in moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis and active psoriatic arthritis. Also, it will aid in the initiation of psoriasis Phase 3 trials, and the initiation of additional Phase 2b clinical trials of NDI-034858 in other autoimmune indications, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and lupus.
In addition, it will support the ongoing Phase 1/2 clinical trials of NDI-101150, Nimbus’ hematopoietic progenitor kinase 1 (HPK1) inhibitor, in patients with solid tumors. The funds will be used for the preclinical development of programs targeting Casitas B-lineage lymphoma b (Cbl-b) and Werner syndrome helicase (WRN) along with ongoing discovery efforts across a range of targets.
“We’re proud to lead this financing round to advance Nimbus’ exciting pipeline of clinical and preclinical candidates,” said Nikola Trbovic, Ph.D., Partner at SV Health Investors. “Nimbus has a remarkable track record of success in discovering and developing differentiated small molecule therapies to address substantial unmet medical needs, and we’re excited to support their current portfolio of programs.”
The strong support from investors in this financing validates the promise and differentiation of Nimbus’ current portfolio of clinical and preclinical programs, and the success of our productive drug discovery engine,” said Jeb Keiper, M.S., MBA, Chief Executive Officer of Nimbus. “I’m pleased to welcome SV Health Investors and Bain Capital Life Sciences to Nimbus’ investor syndicate at this very exciting time in our history, and look forward to generating and sharing critical data for our medicines in development in the near term.”
Appoints new board member
Besides the investment round, Nimbus has recently appointed Gorjan Hrustanovic, Ph.D., Managing Director of BVF Partners, L.P., to its Board of Directors. Dr. Hrustanovic serves on a number of other public and private biotech boards, and trained in cancer biology and translational medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Designs breakthrough medicines
Nimbus Therapeutics was founded by Bruce Booth and Ramy Farid in 2009 in the US to design and develop breakthrough medicines. It designs highly selective and potent medicines to disrupt known drivers of serious diseases, including metabolic disease, cancer and immune-inflammatory disorders.
Using its powerful structure-based drug discovery engine, Nimbus Therapeutics creates potent and selective small molecule compounds targeting proteins known to be fundamental drivers of pathology in highly prevalent human diseases and which have proven difficult for other drug makers to tackle.
It deploys a range of technologies, including X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to generate atomic-resolution structural data on our targets – in some cases, for proteins that have never before been successfully mapped.
