Sci­en­tists be­gan with mak­ing re­com­bi­nant ver­sions of nat­u­ral­ly-oc­cur­ring hu­man pro­teins, then grad­u­at­ed to mon­o­clon­al an­ti­bod­ies. Now, rather than repli­cat­ing moi­eties with­in the body, re­searchers are mod­i­fy­ing these mol­e­cules to have pre­cise bi­ol­o­gy in a func­tion­al man­ner.

This tech­nol­o­gy, re­ferred to as bis­pe­cif­ic an­ti­bod­ies, is al­ready be­ing em­ployed to fight can­cer. In ear­ly 2018, Pan­dion Ther­a­peu­tics was born to re­verse-en­gi­neer the sci­ence in­to the realm of au­toim­mune and in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­or­ders.

Rahul Kakkar

Mon­o­clon­al an­ti­bod­ies are de­signed to in­hib­it a path­way, but Pan­dion is tak­ing a mol­e­cule that the body cre­ates, and en­gi­neer­ing it for the bi­ol­o­gy that we want, said com­pa­ny chief Rahul Kakkar in an in­ter­view.

As the com­pa­ny shep­herds its lead ther­a­py in­to pa­tients, on Wednes­day it raised a meaty $80 mil­lion in a fresh round of fi­nanc­ing.

Pan­dion, which counts Astel­las as a part­ner, has cre­at­ed com­po­nents that can be mixed and matched to cre­ate mol­e­cules that have both the bi­o­log­ic and the chem­i­cal ther­a­peu­tic prop­er­ties that we want, Kakkar ex­plained.

“The way I like to think about it is our mol­e­cules rep­re­sent ar­rows, with­in a quiver of ar­rows that rep­re­sents our pipeline,” he said. “So each of these ar­rows has an ar­row­head. The ar­row­head is an en­gi­neered vari­ant of some­thing our bod­ies nat­u­ral­ly use to con­trol the im­mune sys­tem.”

The ar­row­head in the com­pa­ny’s lead pro­gram — PT101 — is a mu­tat­ed vari­ant of in­ter­leukin two. Nat­u­ral­ly, the body us­es IL-2 to ex­pand reg­u­la­to­ry T cells and to en­hance con­ven­tion­al pro-in­flam­ma­to­ry T cells. Pan­dion’s IL-2 two has been en­gi­neered to be high­ly spe­cif­ic for reg­u­la­to­ry T cells, but to have no ef­fect on the oth­er cells. The ther­a­py is cur­rent­ly be­ing eval­u­at­ed in healthy vol­un­teers — and if all goes well, come 2021, the com­pound will be test­ed in ul­cer­a­tive col­i­tis pa­tients.

The ar­row­head is in charge of the bi­ol­o­gy, but the tail gives the ar­row­head phar­ma­cother­a­peu­tic prop­er­ties that we want. “So we can mar­ry an FC fu­sion, for in­stance, which gives half-life ex­ten­sion, so then that ar­row­head re­sides with­in the sys­temic cir­cu­la­tion, has sys­temic im­mune-mod­u­la­to­ry prop­er­ties and be­haves like an in­jectable bi­o­log­ic,” Kakkar said.

The next junc­ture, which Pan­dion has un­der de­vel­op­ment, is cre­at­ing a bi­func­tion­al or bis­pe­cif­ic, so the tail end ac­tu­al­ly has a func­tion, rather than just half-life ex­ten­sion.

“That tail…is de­signed as a teth­er or a dock, where it binds the ar­row­head with­in an or­gan of in­ter­est so we can, there­fore, guide the ar­row­head in­to spe­cif­ic or­gan sys­tems,” Kakkar said. “So, for in­stance, we can guide it in­to the be­ta cells of the pan­creas, which is where our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Astel­las fo­cus­es.”

The word Pan­dion is the genus name for the os­prey (or a sea hawk), a brown-and-white bird of prey. Spread­ing its wings, it swoops down to wa­ter sur­faces to seize un­sus­pect­ing fish us­ing its talons. “The im­age of a very pre­cise hit with wing­spread ba­si­cal­ly looks like an an­ti­body bind­ing to a very spe­cif­ic lo­cal­iza­tion in ge­og­ra­phy and so that’s ex­act­ly what our mol­e­cules do par­tic­u­lar­ly in the bis­pe­cif­ic for­mat,” said Kakkar.

The Se­ries B was led by Ac­cess Biotech­nol­o­gy, Box­er Cap­i­tal, RA Cap­i­tal and Or­biMed and in­clud­ed the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Po­laris Part­ners, Ver­sant Ven­tures, Roche Ven­ture Fund, SR One, JDRF T1D Fund and BioIn­no­va­tion Cap­i­tal. The Boston-based start­up raised $58 mil­lion in Jan­u­ary 2018.

De­spite the dis­rup­tions faced by the on­go­ing coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, since the biotech in­dus­try is con­sid­ered es­sen­tial in Boston, the com­pa­ny con­tin­ues to work on its com­pounds, al­though all non-lab per­son­nel are work­ing re­mote­ly.

“Frankly speak­ing, the need of pa­tients suf­fer­ing from au­toim­mune dis­ease con­tin­ues and so as long as that need is there, we con­tin­ue to be fo­cused on ex­e­cut­ing on our goals,” Kakkar said.

That be­ing said, work­ing from home is hard­ly a walk in the park. ” I think we’re all sup­port­ing each oth­er as best we can, but I think it’s a chal­lenge for every­one.”

When Venrock partner Bryan Roberts went to check the results from their annual survey of healthcare leaders, what he found was an imprint of the pandemic’s slow arrival in America.

The venture firm had sent their form out to hundreds of insurance and health tech executives, investors, officials and academics on February 24 and gave them two weeks to fill it out. No Americans had died at that point but the coronavirus had become enough of a global crisis that they included two questions about the virus, including “Total U.S. deaths in 2020 from the novel coronavirus will be:”.

Long before Alexion kindled a renaissance of complement therapeutics with the introduction of the first anti-C5 antibody, Mike Holers — a longtime professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine — became fascinated with the host defense system as he completed his rheumatology training. As Soliris begins to fade and follow-on, rivals and even generics catch up to the standard bearer. Holers is debuting a next-generation approach he’s been refining with Atlas Venture over the last two years.