Cardurion Pharmaceuticals is going shopping for more cardio drug candidates.
The Burlington, MA-based biotech, which launched in 2017 with a Takeda partnership, has raised a $260 million Series B round to fully fund two Phase 2 studies of a former Imara drug, bankroll mid-stage tests of another cardio candidate and buy additional assets.
“Cardiovascular has emerged as an increasingly interesting space. People aren’t scared by it anymore. That’s long gone,” CEO Peter Lawrence said in an interview. “People see cardio biotechs as a source of innovation, both in their own right and for big pharma. That helped. I don’t think there is huge inventory in cardio, and I’ve heard that from a lot of potential investors.”
The financing announcement follows a 2021 bet by Bain Capital that was worth as much as $300 million. The new money will help Cardurion figure out whether it can resurrect a former blood disorder drug, Imara’s PDE9 inhibitor tovinontrine, and turn it into a medicine for chronic heart failure patients. The startup is running two Phase 2 trials of the tablets (also known as CRD-750) in both reduced ejection fraction and preserved ejection fraction that should wrap up in October 2025, according to the US federal trials database.
Cardurion will also budget some of the funding to a Phase 2 of its CaMKII inhibitor, called CRD-4730, in patients with the rare genetic arrhythmic disease known as catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia. The biotech is also mulling which large cardio indication to test the capsules in with another clinical trial, Lawrence said.
“CaMKII impacts other parts of calcium cycling, so heart failure with arrhythmia would be a really interesting place to be. Some of our big pharma friends would love to see what a CaMKII inhibitor might look like in a space like that, so we’re getting close to thinking about what a trial design might look like,” the CEO said.
At the same time, the biotech’s founder and chief strategy officer, Michael Mendelsohn, is running a search and evaluation team with a former Merck colleague to see which late-stage preclinical drug candidates they can bring into the pipeline next, Lawrence said. He said Cardurion has a “couple of targets that we love.”
“If we can find a great late preclinical-stage asset that we could move through tox [studies] quickly and into Phase 1, that feels like the right next portfolio build for me,” Lawrence said.
The biotech is also “actively thinking about where we want to take ‘740 next,” Lawrence said, referring to the biotech’s other PDE9 inhibitor, CRD-740, which met its primary goal in a Phase 2a heart failure study earlier this year.
Ascenta Capital led the Series B. The round also includes a long list of blue-chip investors, some of which are known for crossover and public investing. New investors NEA, GV, Fidelity Management & Research, Millennium Management, Farallon Capital Management, Invus, Blue Owl Healthcare, Delos Capital and Digitalis Ventures also took part, as did existing backers Bain Capital Life Sciences and Bain Capital Private Equity.
The up to $300 million agreement with Bain, announced in October 2021, included a portion dedicated to a Series A, and an undisclosed amount reserved for funding internal assets and bringing in new ones. Cardurion has used all of the funds dedicated to the Series A and an undisclosed “percentage” of the “expansion capital,” Lawrence said.
Alongside the financing, Cardurion added a trio of investors to its board: Ascenta co-founder Evan Rachlin, GV executive venture partner Dan Lynch and NEA partner Ed Mathers. The company has about 65 employees, with about 15 at a discovery site in Shonan, Japan.