San Diego’s Aragon Raises $42 Million, Targets Hormone-Driven Cancers

Aragon Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego startup targeting hormone-driven cancers, has raised $42 million in a Series C financing led by a new investor, the Topspin Fund, a Long Island, NY-based firm affiliated with the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies.

Aragon CEO Richard Heyman tells me the life sciences startup was founded in 2009 to advance work by Charles Sawyers of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and other researchers who are focused on the role certain hormones and their receptors play in fueling cancer growth. Such hormone-driven cancers are usually treated with anti-hormonal therapies, but often become resistant, leading Sawyers and others to focus on the hormone receptors in these signaling pathways.

Aragon was founded to identify and develop small molecule drugs capable of blocking and even depleting elevated levels of the androgen receptor (AR) and similar receptors. Heyman says the idea of getting rid of the androgen receptors was even carried into naming the company Aragon—as in “AR gone.”

Rich Heyman

Aragon plans to use proceeds of the funding, which comes from existing investors Aisling Capital, OrbiMed Advisors, and The Column Group, to advance its cancer drug development program on two fronts.

On one front, Heyman says Aragon is moving to a mid-stage clinical trial of its lead drug candidate, ARN-509, for patients with a form of cancer known as castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Such cancers are no longer responsive to treatments that use chemical or surgical means to reduce androgens. Last month, the company presented data from an early stage clinical trial that showed the compound was safe and well tolerated—and also demonstrated some promising anti-tumor activity—in CRPC patients. The company has enrolled 120 patients in the mid-stage trial, and Heyman says the cash infusion will enable Aragon to complete the study and prepare for later-stage studies.

Heyman says the funding also will help Aragon move ahead with preclinical and early stage studies targeting the estrogen receptor in women with breast cancer. A molecule that Aragon has under development not only binds to

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.