Protein degradation biotech EpiBiologics has brought in $107 million in a star-studded series B round headed up by Johnson & Johnson’s and Google’s respective venture arms.
A key goal of the San Francisco Bay Area-based biotech is to take its lead bispecific antibody, dubbed EPI-326, into the clinic. The EGFR degrader is designed to “overcome limitations of existing EGFR therapies by localizing degradation to the tumor while sparing normal healthy tissue,” according to a Jan. 8 release.
The company pointed to preclinical data for EPI-326, which it said demonstrated that the bispecific “drives strong and durable efficacy with favorable safety and pharmacokinetics, enabling both monotherapy and combination approaches for multiple cancer types.”
The plan is to launch a clinical trial of EPI-326 in non-small cell lung cancer and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma in “early 2026,” according to the release.
The potential of EpiBiologics’ tissue-selective extracellular protein degradation attracted a range of high-profile investors, including Google’s GV venture arm and J&J’s VC arm JJDC, which co-led the series B round.
Returning investors included the likes of Polaris Partners, Digitalis Ventures, Taiho Ventures, Vivo Capital, Codon Capital and Mission BioCapital, while Novartis Venture Fund was among the backers to take an interest in the biotech for the first time.
“We’re delighted to work with this distinguished group of investors as we enter the next stage of EpiBiologics’ growth,” the biotech’s CEO Ann Lee-Karlon, Ph.D., said in the release.
“This financing allows us to advance our pipeline of novel bispecific antibodies to selectively degrade disease-driving membrane and soluble targets in oncology and immunology,” Lee-Karlon added. “Our lead program, EPI-326, is moving rapidly to the clinic as a highly differentiated therapeutic to address substantial unmet needs for patients with EGFR-driven cancers.”
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EpiBiologics launched in 2023 with a $50 million series A, having been founded to take forward the work of renowned antibody engineer Jim Wells, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco. The resulting EpiTAC platform is designed to enable targeted degradation of disease-driving extracellular proteins in a tissue-specific manner.
Big Pharmas have been taking a keen interest in protein degradation for a while—see Amgen’s buyout of U.K. biotech Deep Blue Therapeutics earlier this week as the most recent example.
EpiBiologics’ pitch to investors has been that while most protein degradation approaches focus primarily on intracellular proteins, the EpiTAC platform allows the company to target both membrane proteins and secreted proteins through the use of genetically encoded bifunctional antibodies.