Thursday, September 8, 2011

Aura Biosciences closes $4.5M Series A, forms NIH deal

By Lori Valigra, Mass High Tech correspondent

Aura Biosciences Inc., a Cambridge-based developer of nanotechnology drug delivery systems, said it has raised $4.5 million from private investors to advance its programs into the clinic, and entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The Series A was done in two tranches, one for about $1.4 million that closed in September 2010 and a second one for $3M that closed in late August 2011. With a seed round of $3.5 million when the company started, the total raised to date is $8 million.

“Eighty percent of the money is from a very small group of wealthy investors. All are pharma entrepreneurs,” said Elisabet de los Pinos, founder and CEO of Aura Biosciences. She would not be more specific.

The funds will be used to build Aura’s infrastructure and team, and to move toward the company’s first investigational new drug (IND) application before the end of 2012, she said.

The company has been expanding. In June, what had been a virtual company moved into facilities in the old Wyeth building in north Cambridge and hired four employees, bringing its total to nine. “We’re still a very small company. We want to be extremely cash efficient, so we’ll have a balance of in-house employees and outsourcing,” she said.

The CRADA also is a major move forward for the company. Aura will collaborate with the laboratory of John Schiller at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Schiller has focused on basic biology and vaccine development related to human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause cancer. Schiller and colleague Douglas R. Lowy, MD, both of the Laboratory of Cellular Oncology, Center for Cancer Research at NCI, are the first and second inventors on government-owned patents for HPV vaccines licensed to Merck & Co., Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline.

De los Pinos said Aura and NCI have common ground for their development, with both having worked on similar nanoparticle technologies. Aura’s research director, Rhonda Kines, was a postdoc for Schiller and did much of the experimental work on NCI’s nanoparticles before joining Aura. NCI and Aura each have their own intellectual property (IP) from their separate work to date, but the CRADA will produce IP to which Aura will have exclusive commercial rights, de los Pinos said. “This is a way for Aura to consolidate IP and get a strong position in the field.”

The CRADA work, which will last for two years, will include HPV nanoparticles as well as broader cancer indications, she said. She would not comment on the money involved in the CRADA, except to say Aura would get some sponsored work at NCI for experiments conducted there. It also will get advice, which she said is hard to put a price tag on.

Aura will add technology from the collaboration to its current Nanosmart technology platform based on nanosphere particles, which have a selective tropism (preferential targeting) for epithelial-derived tumor cells. The company said this makes the technology able to both diagnose cancer metastases early and to target medicines at the tumors. In the first step, the nanosphere particles encapsulate fluorescing molecules and hone in on diseased tissue, penetrating the cancerous cells and releasing a fluorescent signal that can be seen in real time with existing medical imaging equipment. In the second step, nanospheres loaded with a chemotherapeutic drug can deliver a lethal dose directly to the tumor cancer cells, ostensibly increasing the drug’s efficacy while greatly reducing toxic side effects, according to Aura. While the company first will focus on producing a commercial drug, it may later develop a diagnostic, de los Pinos said.

De los Pinos said Schiller’s lab discovered that the nanoparticles have a tumor specificity. Aura found that the particles also can target distant cancer metastasis.

“Malignant tumors of epithelial tissues are the most common form of cancer and are responsible for the majority of cancer-related deaths in the U.S. Mortality is linked increasingly to early metastasis, which is often undetected at the time of primary diagnosis,” de los Pinos said. “The development of a real-time detection system that is sensitive and specific for epithelial tumors, and that can further enable a targeted treatment to distant metastases, could lead to major improvements in efficacy and survival rates.”

De los Pinos expects to make an IND filing based on the collaboration with NCI and start testing within 18 months. She would not be specific about the type of cancer that will be targeted.

The NCI collaboration will be a boost to Aura. “For a startup, this CRADA is great. NCI collaborates with early stage companies to get a proof-of-principle faster [than with big pharma].”

Aura also is moving ahead with its own Nanosmart programs for HPV-related disease, she said, including cervical dysplasia. The CRADA will expand the technology to other cancer indications.