Can IDO/PD-L1 combo work? Novo-backed IO spells out how in IPO filing

 Add another biotech to the horde of companies aiming to make their Nasdaq debuts before the calendar turns to 2022.

Copenhagen’s IO Biotech filed its SEC paperwork late last week, penciling in $100 million for its initial offering. The move comes about nine months after the Novo Seeds-backed company pulled in a $154.5 million Series B in January to advance its immune-modulating IDO and PD-L1 cancer vaccines.

IO Biotech has pinned its hopes and dreams on a rebound in IDO, and so far private investors appear to like what they’re seeing. In a previous interview with Endpoints News, Novo Seeds managing partner Søren Møller tied the company’s quick rise to an “inflection point” after IO launched a Phase II study in non-small cell lung cancer in May 2019.

The FDA has also taken notice of the biotech, granting IO researchers a BTD in unresectable or metastatic melanoma for combining its lead asset with Merck’s Keytruda. The program combines two candidates, IO102 and IO103, that work to direct T cells against IDO and PD-L1, respectively.

This approach is designed to attack the tumor microenvironments with the hope of eliminating them altogether, but IDO and checkpoint combinations are something with which biopharmas have struggled previously. Incyte’s effort to match epacadostat with Keytruda in melanoma whiffed in April 2018 while NewLink Genetics scrapped a Phase III trial for its own IDO program.

Where IO Biotech hopes to succeed is by deriving peptides from IDO and PD-L1 in their experimental drugs, activating that microenvironment-killing immune response, Møller said.

IO Biotech did not spell out how big its investors’ stakes are in the company, though Novo Holdings sits atop the list. The company has also seen funding from Lundbeck, Sunstone’s third life sciences fund, HBM and Vivo Capital.

As for the IPO funds themselves, IO Biotech plans to use the majority to fund a Phase III trial in first-line advanced melanoma, expected to launch by the end of the year. There will also be cash set aside for a “basket” of Phase II trials and a Phase I/II study for a second program in combination with the lead.

Biotech’s IPO market has awoken from its summer hibernation, with nearly a dozen biotechs having filed for Nasdaq in the last few weeks. The industry recently surpassed $14 billion raised across almost 90 newly public biotechs, per the Endpoints tally, figures that remain on pace to surpass 2020’s record sums of $16.5 billion from 91 companies.

https://endpts.com/can-an-ido-pd-l1-combo-ever-work-novo-backed-company-spells-out-how-in-biotechs-latest-ipo-filing/