A small Swiss biotech has raised a $100 million Series C to start testing its oral small molecule for Alzheimer’s disease in a Phase 2 later this year.
Asceneuron, a Merck KGaA spinout, is developing the O-GlcNAcase (OGA) inhibitor ASN51 and is hoping to go up against the two leading drugmakers in the Alzheimer’s field: Eli Lilly and Biogen.
The 12-year-old biotech started raising the Series C around the beginning of the year, CEO Barbara Angehrn Pavik said in an interview. She joined last fall after helping Vifor exit to CSL for $11.7 billion as chief business officer. Asceneuron was light on specifics of the Phase 2 trial design, including whether it’d be a global study.
Led by Novo Holdings, the Series C is expected to fully fund the trial and potentially see whether ASN51 can be developed for additional conditions, including Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, according to new board member Naveed Siddiqi, a senior partner on the venture investments team at Novo Holdings.
In addition to Novo Holdings, other investors in the Series C include new backers EQT Life Sciences’ LSP Dementia Fund, OrbiMed and SR One, along with existing financial supporters M Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, GSK Equities Investments and Johnson & Johnson Innovation’s JJDC.
Race with Lilly, Biogen
Biogen and Lilly are also developing their own experimental medicines aiming to inhibit the OGA enzyme with the goal of slowing down or curbing the buildup of tau protein.
Naveed SiddiqiBiogen and Lilly’s current marketed drugs — Leqembi and Kisunla, respectively — go after the pesky protein amyloid. But their new medicines, alongside Asceneuron, seek to destroy tau. The neurodegenerative-linked protein comes after amyloid and can damage neurons upon accumulation.
Lilly is in the lead on the OGA front, with a Phase 2 of its drug LY3372689 estimated to wrap up this summer, according to the federal trials database. Biogen’s candidate, named BIIB113, completed a Phase 1 last year. Multiple other drugmakers are developing anti-tau treatments with different approaches.
Leqembi was approved in 2023, but has had a slow commercial rollout, and Kisunla secured FDA approval last month after multiple delays over the past year. These anti-amyloid drugs have to be infused, which can be a strain on healthcare systems and can cause logistical hurdles for patients, and they’ve come with safety concerns about brain swelling and bleeding.
Ryan Schubert“The infrastructure and cost of this is enormous, so what the field really needs is an oral, a pill, you could take at home. And what we picked up was that there is a new class coming through of OGA inhibitors, which Lilly, Biogen and Asceneuron are developing,” Siddiqi said.
“Lilly will hopefully validate this class later on this year, and then we are second after that in a very large market,” Siddiqi said. He said it’s believed that tau is “more highly correlated with the loss of your cognition than amyloid is.”
The field has been trying to tackle tau for years. Lilly, Biogen, Roche, AbbVie and others have attempted anti-tau approaches with monoclonal antibodies, but none of them panned out in key clinical studies. “If you want an efficacious tau-targeting approach or therapy, it really is going to need to influence the aggregation of tau inside the cell,” Asceneuron SVP of R&D Ryan Schubert said.