Muna Launches On 'Rising Tide' Of Alzheimer's
Raises $73m In Series A Financing
Executive Summary
Backed by investors such as Sofinnova, Polaris and Sanofi Ventures, Muna has assembled a strong team dedicated to developing small molecules to repair neuronal dysfunction and resolve neuroinflammation.
Against the background of the upsurge in interest in Alzheimer's disease driven by the recent controversial US approval of Biogen's Aduhelm, Muna Therapeutics has launched with an impressive $73m series A financing supported by a global syndicate of big name investors who are backing the Danish biotech's approach to slowing or stopping neurodegenerative diseases.
Muna, which means 'to remember' in old Norse, was founded in 2020 by Simon Glerup and his team from Aarhus University, Denmark, with seeding from Novo Holdings, based on a novel progranulin receptor that showed potential for diseases like frontotemporal dementia. The company then entered into a partnership on additional targets with Italian clinical research organization Axxam, which became a minority shareholder, then joined forces with K5 Therapeutics, a Belgian discovery platform company based on an all-in-human spatial transcriptomic analysis of brain cell responses to amyloid beta plaques and tangles, co-founded by Bart De Strooper from KU Leuven and investors Droia Ventures and VIB.
The combined company's CEO is Rita Balice-Gordon, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Novo Seeds, former global chief of rare and neurologic diseases at Sanofi and ex-head of integrative neuroscience and neuroinflammation at Pfizer Inc. She told Scrip that Muna was proud to have built up "a great syndicate of European blue chip venture capitalists and a first-class US investor in Polaris." The investor syndicate was co-led by Novo Holdings, Sofinnova, Droia and LSP Dementia Fund, with Polaris, Sanofi Ventures, V-Bio Ventures and VIB joining the round.
Balice-Gordon noted that the series A raise began in earnest in January this year, "and we had the participants pulled together in the April-May timeframe.I have to say that Zoom is a tool that does not substitute for interpersonal interactions but it's an awfully good proxy in the world that we're living in now." It is especially handy for Muna, given that "we will have a footprint in Copenhagen, we have our structural biology team in Aarhus, our discovery platform is in Leuven and I am in the US. Eventually we'll have additional clinical and business operations in the US, that is our plan down the road."
She said that based on the work from the De Strooper and Glerup laboratories, Muna can boast a cutting-edge small molecule drug discovery engine that leverages high-resolution target structural approaches, AI-driven computational chemistry and cell-based screening. "We will have a discovery platform that's all-in-human and disease relevant. We are not just comparing control brain and Alzheimer's brain or disease brain, but we're also looking at a third comparator, which is people who have Alzheimer's pathology but who are not cognitively impaired."
Balice-Gordon added that the focus is on developing targets that can "not just reverse a response to a disease pathology but can confer resilience to the effects of that pathology. This is a new area that's burgeoning and to the best of my knowledge, Muna would be the only neurodegeneration company that has planted the flag in resilience biology for future portfolio growth."
She noted that "our current programs are all targets that have strong genetic validation and clear disease relevance." The financing will be used to advance two of those programs, which are focused on repairing neuronal dysfunction, resolving neuroinflammation and restoring neuroprotection and resilience to disease, towards investigational new drug (IND) applications by late 2023/early 2024. For the discovery platform, "our goal is to bring in two novel targets into the Muna pipeline by the end of 2022," Balice-Gordon added.
Aduhelm And Risk:Benefit
Although most of the groundwork was done for the series A earlier this year, she acknowledged that the timing of the US Food and Drug Administration's controversial decision to grant accelerated approval to Biogen, Inc. and Eisai Co., Ltd.'s Aduhelm (aducanumab) on 7 June based on a surrogate endpoint of beta-amyloid reduction had come in handy. (Also see "Aduhelm Approval Boosts Other Alzheimer’s Drug Developers" - Scrip, 7 Jun, 2021.)
"In a nutshell, a rising tide floats all boats and I think Muna has experienced a little bit of that in the weeks since the aducanumab approval, and I think other companies in this space have benefitted as well," she said.
The Aduhelm controversy is ongoing but Balice-Gordon views the approval as a positive step. "I think these decisions ultimately are all about risk and benefit and I don't want to second guess the regulators but in this case, the critical data on which patients will benefit and where the risk lies is going to come from the very large postmarketing studies that will be done."
She added: "When you think about the tremendous unmet need in Alzheimer's disease, I think we owe it to patients to be thoughtful and careful and protect their safety, but also give opportunities for experimental medicines to be tested in a real world setting. Let careful monitoring of the outcomes guide us to the next generation of medicines that lie beyond aducanumab."
Balice-Gordin continued: "I give Biogen a lot of credit for staying the course and bringing us to the point where we can have reasoned discussions about the pros and cons that are data based. I view this overall as a positive. I understand there are people who have a different point of view, and I respect that, but I think, net, this is a win for patients and that's what this is all about."
She concluded by saying that "we are in an era of rapid advancement in understanding how to slow or stop the relentless progression of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia" and Muna has assembled a team "committed to leveraging our collective expertise to deliver impactful disease modifying small molecule therapeutics to patients as rapidly as possible.”