바이오스펙테이터

by Sungmin Kim

Orum Therapeutics, a biotech company pioneering the development of targeted protein degraders to treat cancer, today announced the close of a $84 million Series B financing. This includes a previously announced $30 million financing and $54 million in new funds led by IMM Investment and joined by new investors (KDB Investment and Atinum, among others) and existing investors (Intervest and KB Investment, among others).

The lead therapeutic programs from Orum’s AnDC platform are ORM-5029 for the treatment of solid tumors and ORM-6151 for the treatment of hematological cancers. Each program employs a different antibody drug to specifically deliver Orum’s lead neoDegrader to tumor cells. The company plans to file Investigational New Drug (IND) applications for ORM-5029 and ORM-6151 in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

Orum plans to use the proceeds to advance the Company’s lead therapeutic candidates into clinical trials, explore additional payload chemistries to develop additional payloads that modulate the ubiquitin pathway, and other general corporate purposes.

Orum’s Antibody neoDegrader Conjugate (AnDC) platform is built on novel targeted protein degrader payloads combined with the precise tumor cell delivery mechanisms of antibodies to generate innovative, first-in-class antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) for the treatment of cancer. The company has developed a new class of ADC payloads, called neoDegraders, to specifically degrade intracellular target proteins within cancer cells via the E3 ubiquitin ligase pathway. Conjugated to antibodies, neoDegraders are designed to be delivered specifically to cancer cells and degrade the intracellular target protein and cause tumor cell death.

“AnDCs leverage the strengths of both targeted protein degraders and ADCs while overcoming the limitations of each modality. Advances in ADC therapies have been hampered by a lack of diversity in payloads with a novel mechanism of action to inhibit tumor cell growth, and small molecule degraders do not possess tissue specificity," said Peter U. Park, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Orum Therapeutics. “The team at Orum has created a unique set of payloads that can target intracellular proteins for degradation. These first-in-class targeted ADC protein degraders have the potential to deliver precise and catalytic tumor-killing action to improve cancer treatment.”

“We believe our AnDC platform overcomes the lack of diversity in ADC payloads and the limitations of current targeted protein degrader technologies,” said Sung Joo Lee, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Orum Therapeutics. “With encouraging preclinical data on our two lead therapeutic candidates, we are excited to use the proceeds to continue to advance our first-in-class tumor-directed targeted protein degraders into the clinic for the treatment of cancer.”