Our immune systems churn out antibodies to fight infections, so perhaps it’s about time that some biotech companies started getting in on the action. Arsanis, co-founded late last year by successful biotech entrepreneur Tillman Gerngross, is using the antibody discovery technology from another of Gerngross’s startups, Lebanon, NH-based Adimab, to find antibody drugs that might provide a new alternative to antibiotics for bacterial infections.
Adimab doesn’t develop drugs. Rather, large pharmaceutical companies—such as Merck & Co. (NYSE:[[ticker:MRK]]), Pfizer (NYSE:[[ticker:PFE]]), and Roche—have hired the startup to use its yeast-based system to discover antibodies for those companies to develop. Now it’s got a new way to commercialize its technology—via Arsanis, which Adimab spun out to focus exclusively on applying the technology to the infectious diseases field. And three of Adimab’s previous backers—Obimed Advisors, Polaris Venture Partners, and SV Life Sciences—are investing in Arsanis. The new startup—whose $9.6 million financing I reported last week—has now raised about $10 million, according to Gerngross.
“When we find people who really know what they are doing, and we think the Adimab value can make a difference, we are interested in starting companies around that,” says Gerngross, who is CEO of Adimab and president of Arsanis.
For Arsanis, Gerngross was able to find an expert in infectious disease drug development, Eszter Nagy, to be the new startup’s chief scientist. Nagy will lead the company’s main lab in Vienna, Austria, where the firm is rapidly hiring scientists and plans to grow from about seven employees to 20 to 25 workers within a few months, Gerngross says. The company will be a U.S. entity with most of its staff in Vienna. Nagy was previously a senior VP of research at Vienna-based vaccine developer Intercell, where she and the team had acquired antibody discovery technology from Cytos Biotechnology in May to pursue new antibody treatments for infectious diseases.
Arsansis (which was also co-founded by Adimab chief operating officer Errik Anderson) hasn’t disclosed which specific infections it plans to target. Yet Gerngross, who is also a professor of bioengineering at Dartmouth College, says that Arsanis plans to nail down three lead programs that are worthy of clinical testing, and its financing gives the company enough money to operate for about two years. While Arsanis’s team will be in charge of identifying which disease targets to pursue, Adimab’s job is discover the antibodies that can hit those targets. Adimab will then keep a certain percentage of ownership in the antibodies that Arsanis develops, Gerngross says.
Kreogene, an earlier Adimab spinout with a similar business model as Arsanis, was a bust. Polaris and Orbimed Advisors seeded the little-known firm in 2008 to develop cocktails of antibody drugs to treat cancer. Gerngross, who co-founded the company with Murray Korc, chair of medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH, says that the startup shut down before it ever really got off the ground.
Gerngross isn’t accustomed to failure in biotech. GlycoFi, the biotech he started before Adimab, was sold to Merck for
