Dive Brief:
- Caldera Therapeutics announced its official launch Wednesday, touting its experimental medicine designed to take on two different targets connected to inflammatory bowel disease.
- The company raised $75 million in a Series A round from Atlas Venture, LAV and venBio and followed that up with a $37.5 million Series A-1 financing led by Omega Funds and involving Wellington Management and Janus Henderson Investors.
- Researchers have already administered the first doses of the company’s drug, dubbed CLD-423, in a Phase 1 trial of healthy volunteers, Caldera said. The company licensed the medicine from China’s Qyuns Therapeutics in April for $10 million up front, just under 25% of the equity in Caldera and a promise of as much as $545 million more in milestone payments.
Dive Insight:
Caldera is following an increasingly popular path by looking to China’s booming biopharmaceutical industry for experimental drugs. Lower costs and a more flexible regulatory atmosphere allow Chinese companies to move much faster from launch to clinical trials. The drugmakers then often benefit from a U.S. or European company swooping in for a licensing agreement.
As with Caldera, some of the most well-financed companies to emerge from stealth in recent years are built around therapies acquired in China. High-profile names in 2024 and 2025 include Kailera Therapeutics, Ouro Medicines and Expedition Therapeutics. And then there’s Candid Therapeutics, which debuted in 2024 after buying two private biotechs with cancer drug prospects from China.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Caldera is looking to enter an IBD market that analysts have estimated will reach $30 billion by the end of the decade. The category includes medicines for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, both caused by inflammation in the digestive tract.
Traditional IBD treatments that target one disease-causing protein in the body have “hit an efficacy ceiling,” according to Caldera. CLD-423 is designed to take on two proteins that have been implicated in IBD – TL1A, which has captured the attention of drugmakers including Sanofi and Merck & Co., and IL-23p19, a subunit of IL-23, the target of widely used drugs such as AbbVie’s Skyrizi.
“By elegantly combining two powerful autoimmune targets in a single molecule, CLD-423 represents the next frontier in IBD treatment,” Caldera CEO Praveen Tipirneni said in the company’s release.
