Confo Therapeutics Raises €30m Series A To Drug Difficult Targets
Executive Summary
Belgian drug discovery company raises funds to finance development of its platform to discover compounds targeting difficult-to-drug GPCRs and advance lead program to the clinic.
Confo Therapeutics, the Ghent-based drug discovery company that uses single domain antibody fragments derived from camelid antibodies, has raised €30m in a Series A round. The funds will be used to accelerate its proprietary drug discovery activities and advance its pipeline of GPCR-modulating compounds to create drug candidates for clinical trials.
“The €30m will get the lead program to Phase I and continue to feed the pipeline to deliver clinical candidates going forward. Meanwhile, we will continue to optimize our discover engine by investing in all key aspects of the Confo technology: ConfoBody discovery, ConfoBody-enabled screening and structure determination, to further increase its productivity,” Cedric Ververken, Confo’s CEO, told Scrip.
Using a platform developed by Confo co-founder and CSO Jan Steyaert at Brijie Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), the company has developed Confobodies which are single domain antibodies that are both selective and able to stabilize G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) in active conformation, which is essential to discover compounds capable of targeting GPCRs.
“We have methods in place to discover ConfoBodies, have developed multiple ConfoBody-based screening methods (ConfoScreen) and, earlier this year, we have acquired a complementary technology, Megabodies, to use ConfoBodies for structure determination via high-resolution cryoEM,” he added.
Confo has, so far, screened on six different targets and, Ververken claims, was able in all cases to identify novel chemical starting points with the desirable pharmacology “We cannot disclose the actual targets at this point, but we can say we are working on a fibrosis target and on two targets in orphan diseases. We are mainly focusing on agonist drugs today, as this is where our technology brings a unique advantage over other GPCR platforms, but we also pick up inverse agonists and antagonists in our screens,” he explained.
The first wave of targets Confo has selected are quite well-validated, either through human genetics or through previous therapeutic attempts which failed for various non-target related reasons, but are notoriously difficult to crack.
Like many biotech companies, Confo is pursuing a hybrid business model, combining the development of a proprietary therapeutics pipeline with pharma drug discovery collaborations. The company has secured deals with Lundbeck Inc. and Roche but specific details of the collaborations have not been disclosed.
“The first partnerships we entered into are drug discovery deals in which the partner nominated the GPCR target(s) of interest. We deployed our technology to discover compounds and those go back to the partner, which can be at different stages, eg. hits or optimized molecules, for them to continue development and hopefully commercialise the resulting products,” he explained.
As far as its proprietary pipeline is concerned, Confo’s most advanced compound has been shown to work in vivo. “We’ve developed a proprietary screening assay which delivered hits, elaborated those hits to in vitro activity and continued to improve them towards in vivo studies,” he added.
The Series A round was co-led by new investors BioGeneration Ventures and Wellington Partners which were joined by new investors Fund+ and Perceptive Advisors and existing investors Capricorn Health-tech Fund, Qbic, Participatie Maatschappij Vlaanderen NV, MINTS, V-Bio Ventures and VIB. Ververken says he expects the money to finance the company through to early 2022.