A San Diego startup sees covalent biologics as the next frontier in cancer drugs

15 Dec 2022
www.biopharmadive.com
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Dive Brief:
Enlaza Therapeutics, a cancer drug startup, emerged from stealth Thursday with $61 million in funding and licensed technology from the University of California, San Francisco and The Scripps Research Institute.
The La Jolla, Calif.-based company has the backing of several heavyweight investors including Avalon Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Frazier Life Sciences and Samsara BioCapital. Avalon Ventures managing partner Sergio Duron will lead the company as its CEO.
Enlaza will attempt to develop covalent biologics, or protein-based drugs that can lock onto their target via covalent bonds. Typically, drugs that can do so are small molecules.
Dive Insight:
Enlaza’s approach involves introducing what it describes as “unnatural” amino acids to protein drugs. The addition of this new protein building block helps the drugs form covalent bonds, and in ways that are selective to its target — or at least so Enlaza claims.
Enlaza hopes this technology can give it the tools to develop more potent protein drugs, but also ones that can go after cell surface molecules that are usually difficult to reach. Medicines that the company develops would lock onto a tumor, for example, and deliver a payload while still maintaining high systemic clearance, Duron said.
Its $61 million Series A round will be used to gather more preclinical data, with plans to move toward human trials, though Duron gave no estimates on when that would happen.
Duron said the company is well-positioned to grow its workforce in support of that research progression. Enlaza has hired 30 people in the past year, including chief scientific officer Analeah Heidt, who comes with experience from Inhibrx and Novartis.
“One of the benefits at Enlaza in our technologies is that we can actually access a pretty diverse set of potential partners,” Duron said. “We can enable small-format protein biologics without half-life extension strategies.”
Enlaza, which is part of Avalon Ventures’ accelerator program, derives its name from the Spanish conjugation for the verb “to link.” The company says it’s the first to focus on covalent biologics, rather than small molecules. Academic researchers at UCSF and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in recent years identified covalent protein drugs as a potential approach to cancer treatment. Lei Wang, who is an author on that UCSF research, is a scientific adviser for Enlaza.
Though Enlaza will initially focus on treating solid tumors, the company is exploring the possibility of treating other diseases down the line, such as autoimmune disorders.
“The Enlaza platform opens the possibility to enhance the therapeutic index of biologic drugs in a way that is not accessible with platforms relying on conventional recombinant technologies,” Marcos Milla, a venture partner at Samsara BioCapital, said in a statement. “It also offers an opportunity to address hard to target cell surface molecules in a highly specific fashion.”
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