Blend Therapeutics Inc. said it will use a $38 million series C equity financing to carry a new lead candidate for neuroendocrine cancers into phase I studies by mid-year and what president and CEO Drew Fromkin told BioWorld Today will be "well through major data inflection points." The shift, in which Blend is rebranding itself as Tarveda Therapeutics Inc., will also see an offloading of its former lead candidate, the platinum drug BTP-114, to newly formed Placon Therapeutics Inc.

Proceeds from the financing will be used to advance a pipeline of Pentarins, miniaturized antibody drug conjugates, that Tarveda is developing for a range of solid tumor targets, led by PEN-221.

"The name change really marks a new trajectory for the company built around our Pentarins," Fromkin said. "As we build out our Pentarins, I believe there will be ample opportunity to interact with collaborators and partners, but with this syndicate, there's really no need to pursue that early."

New investor Novo A/S co-led the financing with long-time Blend backer New Enterprise Associates. Flagship Ventures, Nanodimension and Eminent Venture Capital also participated. Alongside with the financing, Novo Ventures senior principal Nilesh Kumar and NEA partner Frank Torti will join Tarveda's board. The company also hired a new chief medical officer, Leila Alland, who most recently served as vice president and head of oncology early clinical development at Astrazeneca plc and earlier worked at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.

It was unclear on what timeline Tarveda will see the new money, as Fromkin declined to share further details, but he did allow that the money should help the company not only create value with PEN-221, but also support the firm through "a number of additional development programs with our Pentarins in multiple solid tumor targets." Prior to Wednesday's financing, the company had raised nearly $25 million in equity, including a $16 million series B in 2012. (See BioWorld Today, Dec. 19, 2012.)

Antibody drug conjugates are designed to selectively deliver cytotoxic agents to tumor cells while avoiding normal, healthy tissue. But, while their development has been exciting, ADCs have generally shown their best results in blood cancers, said Fromkin. In solid cancers, however, where the solid tumors are dense, the size of the ADCs have presented limitations with respect to the penetration of those tumors. Pentarins, which weigh in at about 2 kD to 5 kD and maintain that tiny mass throughout their production, are pint-sized relative to the 150 kD average mass of ADCs, said Fromkin, a quality that helps them penetrate solid tumors and help bring beneficial pharmacokinetic and biodistribution qualities to the table.

PEN-221, the lead candidate in the Pentarins program, is designed to treat patients whose tumor cells overexpress the somatostatin, something that's most often found in neuroendocrine cancers or small-cell lung cancer of neuroendocrine origin, Fromkin said.

The company plans to identify those people with a currently approved diagnostic and, potentially, other new diagnostics in late-stage development. Tarveda will then enroll only those patients, since they're most likely to benefit from treatment with PEN-221 early in the trials. About 90 percent of people with neuroendocrine cancers and about 50 percent of people with small-cell lung cancers have tumors that express the somatostatin receptor that Tarveda is looking for, Fromkin said.

There are currently at least 10 additional somatostatin receptor regulators in development for cancer indications according to Thomson Reuters Cortellis Clinical Trials Intelligence, including seven molecules in discovery, two molecules in phase I and two molecules in phase II. Only Biomedica Life Sciences SA and Progenics Pharmaceuticals Inc., developer of the phase II somatostatin receptor agonist 90Y-edotreotide, appears to be have worked on a program that's exploring neuroendocrine tumors.

Fromkin said that Placon, which was incorporated in November 2015, listing him as the president and sole director at the time, will seek to partner BTP-114 this year.