Strand Therapeutics has raised a $153 million Series B round fresh off unveiling early, but promising results for a cancer therapy it’s making with messenger RNA technology.
The biotechnology startup plans to use the funding to advance that therapy, STX-001, into further testing. A second, experimental medicine called STX-003 should start a Phase 1 clinical trial next year, said Jake Becraft, Strand’s CEO and co-founder.
Strand is making what it describes as “programmable” mRNA therapies that are meant to express proteins in a targeted and timely fashion. Its lead therapy contains the genetic instructions for IL-12, a cytokine that’s been well-studied by drugmakers as a potential booster to cancer immunotherapies, but with mixed results. Rather than administering a recombinant version of the protein, though, Strand uses an mRNA construct to get into tumor cells so they express IL-12, making them more visible to the immune system. The result is supposed to be a precise and powerful cancer-killing blow.
Data presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting earlier this year offered a glimpse at the approach’s promise. In a small, early-stage study, treatment with STX-001 was associated with multiple responses, including one complete response, in people whose solid tumors hadn’t responded to widely used “checkpoint inhibitor” cancer immunotherapies.
The result “underpins what a genetic modality like messenger RNA can offer in this setting,” Becraft said.
That study is ongoing and testing STX-001 as a monotherapy or alongside Merck & Co.’s checkpoint inhibitor Keytruda against multiple tumor types.
Strand’s Series B round was led by Kinnevik, a European venture capital firm that’s invested in biotechs like Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Enveda Biosciences. A dozen other investors also participated, among them Regeneron Ventures, Amgen Ventures and Eli Lilly, and the family office of former Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky.
Before this year’s raise, Strand had banked $97 million to fund its research. The company was launched in 2017 by Becraft and co-founder Tasuku Kitada, years before mRNA technology played a starring role in ending the COVID-19 pandemic.
The latest financing comes as mRNA vaccines have become a political target. Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services canceled nearly $500 million in research funding for mRNA vaccine research. Strand, though, is using mRNA to make therapeutics instead of vaccines, and Becraft contended the technology’s “future is incredibly bright.”
Strand has five other programs in development. Among them are STX-003, which is targeting non-small cell lung cancer and other tumors, and a pair of programs aimed at blood malignancies.
Strand also hopes to eventually prove it can deliver its drugs to a variety of organs and tissues, a difficult hurdle for many developers of genetic medicines to overcome. “We’re interested in anywhere we can create new medicines or innovate on massive limitations of existing medicines,” Becraft said.
