Red Queen Therapeutics is emerging from stealth with $55 million from venture capital group Apple Tree Partners, and plans to develop treatments for a swathe of viral infections including Covid-19 and the flu.
The startup’s thesis is around blocking a mechanism called viral fusion that certain viruses use to enter cells and infect them. By targeting the mechanism, which is highly conserved across viral variants and even across different viruses, the company believes it can develop treatments that can be stockpiled even as different variants of a pathogen circulate.
“It’s resistant to resistance,” said CEO Mark Mitchnick, a venture partner at Apple Tree. “It’s unlikely that a new variant is not going to be affected by the [treatment] that we’ve already made.”
The group of viruses that Red Queen is targeting are known as enveloped viruses, and that includes coronaviruses, which cause both Covid-19 and some common colds, flu virus and RSV.
The company’s name refers to the hypothesis that species must constantly adapt and evolve to compete with each other. The company currently has seven full-time employees, plus consultants.
It was founded based on science from Loren Walensky, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute pediatric oncologist who previously co-founded Aileron Therapeutics, an earlier Apple Tree portfolio oncology company. Both Aileron and Red Queen center on the idea of more stable ‘stapled peptides’, though Aileron is now a lung disease drug company after facing near collapse.
Red Queen has already tested its Covid-19 treatment in a Phase 1 study with people who had mild-to-moderate disease. In that study, the company saw “placebo-like” safety results, Mitchnick said. The early-stage results suggested that people who received the antiviral tested negative for Covid-19 faster, though the numbers weren’t statistically significant in the 67-person clinical trial.
Red Queen hopes to start a Phase 2 study of that Covid-19 antiviral in immunocompromised people later next year, according to Mitchnick.
It also has a BARDA contract — worth “just south of $750,000,” Mitchnick said — to do preclinical work on a pan-flu antiviral. Red Queen’s third candidate is a treatment for three types of viruses — RSV, metapneumovirus, as well as parainfluenza — which impact young children, older adults and those with weakened immune systems.
When asked about the up-and-down interest in infectious disease drug development, Mitchnick responded, “If you look at why we live longer than people did 200 years ago, it’s because of our ability to deal with infectious disease. It’s not our ability to deal with cancer, it’s not seat belts,” he said. “It’s antibiotics and vaccines.”
“Everybody’s super interested, and then it wanes, and then they get very interested again, and those are the cycles that go on. But those of us docs, people who treat patients, never lose their interest in infectious disease,” he said.