Athos Therapeutics, Inc. a late preclinical stage biotechnology company pioneering the development of first-in-class precision therapeutics for patients with autoimmune diseases and cancer, today announced the closing of an oversubscribed $15 million Series A financing.
The funds will be used to advance the company’s preclinical and clinical programs, including the initiation of an initial Phase I human clinical trial of ATH-63 in 2022. Athos is developing ATH-63 for inflammatory bowel disease, lupus, other autoimmune diseases, and select cancer indications. The funds will also be used to develop additional novel targets for autoimmune diseases and two first-in-class small molecule inhibitors for solid cancers and AML. In addition, Athos will continue to advance its proprietary artificial intelligence drug discovery platform and significantly expand its biomaterial omics database for patients through collaborations with major academic medical centers around the world, including the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.
“I am delighted at the progress Athos has made since our Seed round of $4.25MM in March of 2020. Those seed funds enabled us to hire a stellar team, develop a powerful drug discovery engine, perform multi-omics analysis of annotated patient samples from key IBD centers around the world, file 8 patents, and create a medicinal chemistry platform that produced 100’s of highly selective and safe compounds with excellent pharmacologic profiles. The addition of more than $15MM in new funding will allow us to complete a Phase 1 human clinical trial with ATH-63 and progress our autoimmune and novel cancer programs towards the clinic,” shared Dimitrios Iliopoulos, Ph.D., MBA, President & Chief Executive Officer of Athos. “Furthermore, we are excited about the development of a new small-molecule inhibitor that addresses the unmet needs of a subpopulation of AML patients,” he added.
ATH-63 is a small molecule, first-line approach to the massive unmet medical need in IBD. Drugs currently prescribed for IBD have limited efficacy, serious side effects, and were not developed for a specific subtype of IBD patients. The development of ATH-63 was the result of a careful systems biology approach that allowed Athos to characterize IBD subtypes at the molecular level. This involved the use of a proprietary biological and network-based computational analysis of multi-omics data from heavily annotated IBD patient samples.
“The field of IBD is in dire need of more precise, long-lasting, and far safer therapeutic options for millions of patients that suffer from the disease. In response to this need, we developed a highly targeted, precision medicine drug development platform to specifically identify compounds, like ATH-63, that we think will be game-changers for patients,” commented Allan J. Pantuck, MD, MS, Chairman and Chief Medical Officer of Athos. “Our entire team and Board want to extend our sincere thanks to our original seed funders, the many seed holders who also participated in the Series A, and our new Series A investors. We are honored to have all of you on Team Athos,” he added.
