Adcendo is adding $135 million to its arsenal, money that will go toward launching several antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) candidates into the clinic.
California-based investor TCGX led the oversubscribed series B financing, with new investors TPG Life Sciences Innovations, Orbimed Advisors, Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, Citadel’s Surveyor Capital and Logos Capital in tow, according to a Nov. 25 release. Several existing investors—including RA Capital Management and Novo Holdings—also participated in the round.
Adcendo will use the funds to develop and expand its early-stage ADC programs taking aim at cancers with high unmet medical needs.
In October, the FDA gave the Danish biotech the green light to launch in-human testing for ADCE-D01, an ADC designed to be a monotherapy for patients with metastatic and/or unresectable soft tissue sarcoma. The asset targets the uPARAP receptor and will be initially tested in a phase 1/2 study.
“With this financing, Adcendo can rapidly advance a pipeline of exciting, differentiated ADC candidates,” TCGX managing partner Cariad Chester said in the company release. “These programs have the potential to significantly change the treatment paradigm in multiple cancers and serve patients in need of better therapies.”
The fundraise follows Adcendo’s $98 million series A that closed this May.
The biotech has publicly named three other programs, dubbed ADCE-T02, ADCE-B05 and A0401.
ADCE-T02 is an anti-tissue factor ADC that Adcendo picked up this summer, offering Multitude Therapeutics more than $1 billion in biobucks for ex-China rights to the preclinical candidate.
In August, the company said a phase 1 trial of ADCE-T02 would begin in Australia in the fourth quarter of this year, with Adcendo planning to get FDA approval “in the near future” to launch a U.S. study. This would make it the first ADC with a topoisomerase I inhibitor-based linker/payload to enter clinical development across Australia, the U.S. and Europe, the biotech said at the time.