End­points 11 win­ner Car­du­ri­on Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals: A shot at one of heart dis­ease’s 'un­drug­gable' tar­gets

‘Un­drug­gable’ tar­gets aren’t just in on­col­o­gy. Car­du­ri­on Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals is hop­ing to be­come the first to suc­cess­ful­ly de­vel­op a treat­ment for a ge­net­ic heart con­di­tion that re­searchers have been study­ing for decades.

The start­up is work­ing on a rare heart dis­ease known as cat­e­cholamin­er­gic poly­mor­phic ven­tric­u­lar tachy­car­dia — CPVT for short — that can lead to ab­nor­mal heart rhythms and is es­ti­mat­ed to im­pact one in 10,000 peo­ple. To do so, it’s us­ing a CaMKII in­hibitor and has be­come the first to put such a drug in­to hu­man stud­ies.

It’s not an easy tar­get. CaMKII is a pro­tein ki­nase that is in­volved in both heart func­tion and hu­man mem­o­ry — mean­ing that any drug go­ing af­ter it has to be ex­tra pre­cise. Car­du­ri­on CEO Pe­ter Lawrence told End­points News that big phar­ma com­pa­nies they are in con­tact with “were re­al­ly in­trigued by the fact we were able to get in­to hu­man clin­i­cal test­ing with the CaMKII in­hibitor be­cause oth­er ma­jor phar­mas and biotechs have tried for a very long time — and it was hard to do.”

Car­du­ri­on’s plan to de­vel­op the next gen­er­a­tion of heart dis­ease treat­ments in­volves a mix of in­ter­nal re­search and ex­ter­nal hunt­ing. Found­ed by car­di­ol­o­gist and sea­soned in­dus­try ex­ec­u­tive Michael Mendel­sohn, who pre­vi­ous­ly led car­dio­vas­cu­lar re­search at Mer­ck Re­search Lab­o­ra­to­ries, Car­du­ri­on launched in 2017 through a part­ner­ship deal with Take­da. As part of that part­ner­ship, a car­dio­vas­cu­lar re­search team from Take­da’s site in Shonan, Japan turned in­to Car­du­ri­on’s drug dis­cov­ery unit.

Along with its CaMKII in­hibitor, the Mass­a­chu­setts-based com­pa­ny has clin­i­cal tri­als for heart fail­ure study­ing two PDE9 in­hibitors, one of which was a failed blood dis­or­der treat­ment that Car­du­ri­on is look­ing to re­vive. In May, the com­pa­ny tout­ed bio­mark­er re­sults from its Phase 2 study of one of those in­hibitors.

The com­pa­ny de­clined to dis­close ex­act­ly how much mon­ey it has raised, be­yond say­ing it’s some­where north of $500 mil­lion. That in­cludes a $260 mil­lion Se­ries B that Car­du­ri­on an­nounced in Ju­ly and part of a $300 mil­lion com­mit­ment from Bain.

“What we do is trans­late our ex­per­tise in car­dio­vas­cu­lar sig­nal­ing path­ways in­to ther­a­peu­tics for our pa­tients. That is the sci­en­tif­ic the­sis that un­der­girds every­thing that we do,” Lawrence said. “We are con­stant­ly think­ing about what could be at­trac­tive tar­gets to pur­sue in var­i­ous dis­eases. And we don’t talk a lot about what we’re look­ing at, be­cause it’s pro­pri­etary, but it is no dif­fer­ent than on­col­o­gy.”

Key back­ers: As­cen­ta Cap­i­tal, Blue Owl Cap­i­tal, De­los Cap­i­tal, Dig­i­tal­is Ven­tures, Far­al­lon Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, Fi­deli­ty Man­age­ment, GV, Mil­len­ni­um Man­age­ment, New En­ter­prise As­so­ciates, The In­vus Group, Bain Cap­i­tal Life Sci­ences and Bain Cap­i­tal Pri­vate Eq­ui­ty, Po­laris Part­ners, Take­da Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals

Find the full list of 2024 End­points 11 win­ners here.