Ottimo raises $140mn in pursuit of ‘$100bn market’ for new cancer drugs

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Ottimo Pharma, which is developing a new cancer drug, has completed one of the largest early-stage biotech fundraisings of 2024 as its boss seeks to replicate his success in leading oncology group Seagen to a $43bn sale.

The London and Boston-based group has raised $140mn in a series A round and is led by David Epstein, who was chief executive of Seagen until it was sold to Pfizer last year. 

Ottimo is developing an antibody treatment that Epstein hopes could replace the market leaders in cancer care by being more effective and producing fewer side effects for patients. The new class of cancer drugs could be worth up to $100bn a year at its peak, he said.

Epstein said he believed the market for the new type of drug could “easily” be double the size of the market for so-called anti-PD-1 medicines such as Merck’s Keytruda, which stop cancers hiding from the body’s immune system. 

The start-up is developing Jankistomig, a drug that combines an anti-PD-1 with an anti-VEGF, a molecule that tackles another protein on tumours to slow their growth. Epstein thinks it will become the “new backbone immunotherapy to be used across cancer types”, eventually replacing existing treatments. 

“It’s pretty clear that if you can get substantial increases in survival, the older drugs will be used less and less over time,” he told the Financial Times.

“The market currently is about $50bn for anti-PD-1s. If people are staying on [the drug] for twice as long, and you’re going to do tumour types like [hard-to-treat] triple negative breast cancer . . . I think they [will] call it a $100bn market one day.”

Ottimo’s drug will now be tested in a large early-stage trial to find the right dose and combinations with other medicines. It will then have to go through late stage trials to prove efficacy and the regulatory approval process.

The drug candidate was discovered by Jonny Finlay, a protein engineer and serial biotech entrepreneur based in Scotland, who then co-founded Ottimo with European venture capital firm Medicxi. 

Epstein saw the potential for the new class of drugs when biotechs Summit Therapeutics and Akeso reported trial results in September, showing their drug ivonescimab cut the risk of disease progression or death by 49 per cent compared with lung cancer patients treated with Keytruda. 

Germany’s BioNTech has also shown interest in the new type of treatment, signing a $950mn deal to buy Chinese company Biotheus for its similar medicine. 

Ottimo’s series A round is being led by US healthcare investors Orbimed, Avoro Capital Advisors, Avoro Ventures and Samsara BioCapital. Epstein said the round was heavily oversubscribed.   

Ottimo has fewer than ten staff. The company will work with outsourcers to run its clinical trials and so only plans to expand to up to 25 staff next year. 

But Epstein said the company was already getting inbound interest from large drugmakers. “Many big pharma companies that currently have oncology franchises are trying to figure out how to play in this space,” he said.