Acelyrin, a Californian biotechnology startup, has raised a $300 million Series C round that’ll be used to support late-stage clinical testing of a drug it’s developing for a range of inflammatory diseases, the company announced Tuesday.
The funding will bankroll two Phase 3 trials of a drug prospect known as izokibep. In 2021, Acelyrin paid $25 million to acquire the drug from Swedish drugmaker Affibody. It’s since raised more than half a billion dollars and completed Phase 2 trials in two types of inflammatory conditions, psoriatic arthritis and axial spondyloarthritis. Now it aims to bring the medicine into the final stages of human testing. That type of profile would typically make Acelyrin a candidate for an initial public offering. But the turbulent state of the public markets led the Los Angeles-based company to raise another round of private funding instead.
Acelyrin’s drug has shown promise, too. Phase 2 study results presented at a medical meeting in June suggested the medicine has a chance to be more effective than some existing treatments. Yet psoriatic arthritis is a crowded field. In addition to the other IL-17 inhibitorsIL-17 inhibitors, a variety of other medications are available to patients too, including pills known as JAK inhibitorsJAK inhibitors. Acelyrin believes its drug can stand out because of its potential to be more potent. “We think the trade-off of better efficacy against something a little less convenient is an easy one for patients,” Peloso said.
Co-founded and led by Shao-Lee Lin, who was previously chief scientific officer at Horizon Therapeutics and worked at AbbVie, Gilead and Amgen before that, Acelyrin was created in 2020 and raised a $250 million Series B last November. Access Biotechnology was the lead investor in Acelyrin's latest round, which also included participation from Westlake Village BioPartners, Samsara BioCapital and AyurMaya, an affiliate of Matrix Capital Management. Though a record 104 biotech companies priced an IPO in 2021, the pace of new offerings has slowed considerably in 2022, with just 17 to date. Some companies looking for funding have instead opted for additional rounds of private fundraising, investors have said.
Though it isn’t going public just yet, Acelyrin has not ruled out a potential IPO, Peloso said.
“Now we can just execute and wait for the optimal market dynamics to make the next move,” he said.