Enara Bio has snagged $32.5 million in a Series B fundraise, backed in part by Pfizer’s venture arm, to help develop a preclinical pipeline of T cell receptor-based therapies targeting dark antigens for cancer.
The proceeds should give the Oxford, UK-based biotech 18 months of runway, during which it expects to “advance our lead program through candidate” before needing to raise more cash to generate clinical data, CEO Kevin Pojasek told Endpoints News in an interview. The lead program targets an unnamed dark antigen that is mostly expressed in gastrointestinal cancers, he added.
The dark genome refers to the 98% of human DNA that doesn’t encode for proteins and was “overlooked” when the genome was first sequenced in the early 2000s, according to Pojasek.
“Everything was sort of left on the sidelines, either assuming there was no biology there or, if there was, it would be small compared to the known protein-coding genes,” he said. “And of course, that’s not the case.”
Enara Bio is focused on discovering peptides that present on the surface of tumors through a combination of “bioinformatic approaches that allow us to annotate the dark genome” and the latest in mass spectrometry technology, Pojasek said. “Our view has been: Let’s see if we can unlock a whole new target space such that we’re not restricted to what’s out there,” he added.
The biotech’s lead program should be ready to enter its first human trial in 2026 or 2027, which Pojasek described as a “reasonably standard basket study in a subset of indications.” It plans to look for single-agent efficacy and then consider combination approaches and expansion cohorts.
The Series B was co-led by two new investors, Pfizer Ventures and M Ventures, with support from existing backers including RA Capital, Samsara BioCapital and SV Health Investors. Pojasek is a venture partner at SV Health Investors. The Francis Crick Institute also chipped in as a new investor. Enara first launched in 2019 as Ervaxx. It raised a total of $17.5 million in seed and Series A funding.
Since then, the company’s work on dark antigens has attracted notable partners. In January, Boehringer Ingelheim exercised its option to license several of Enara’s dark antigens involved in non-small cell lung cancer, which it plans to use to develop off-the-shelf immunotherapies. The companies started collaborating in 2021 as part of a deal with an undisclosed upfront that featured more than €876 million in milestones.
The German drugmaker’s “candidate cancer vaccine” based on these dark antigens “should hopefully be heading to the clinic in the next couple of years,” Pojasek said.