SutroVax Inc. (South San Francisco, Calif.) raised $85 million in an oversubscribed series C round led by new investor TPG on a newsy Thursday that also saw the vaccine company appoint Moncef Slaoui chairman and sign a deal with contract manufacturing organization Lonza Group Ltd. (SIX:LONN).
Fellow new investors Medicxi and Foresite participated as did all existing investors including Abingworth, Longitude Capital, Frazier Healthcare Partners, Pivotal bioVenture Partners, Roche Venture Fund and CTI Life Sciences Fund.
Slaoui, who is a partner at Medicxi, is former chairman of the vaccines division of GlaxoSmithKline plc (LSE:GSK; NYSE:GSK). He replaces Abingworth’s Kurt von Emster, who will remain a director.
SutroVax's lead program is a broad-spectrum pneumococcal conjugated vaccine (PCV). The candidate was generated using a platform which conjugates pneumococcus-derived polysaccharides onto carrier proteins via the incorporation of non-native amino acids (nnAA) as conjugation anchors.
SutroVax previously told BioCentury that based on unpublished preclinical data, it believes the vaccine could replace Prevnar 13, the standard of care for pneumococcal infection, from Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE) (see BioCentury, March 24, 2017).
"The supply chain is the only thing that would hold us back from being a leading program," von Emster told BioCentury.
Funds from the series C round will be "largely dedicated" to establishing a supply chain, according to President and CEO Grant Pickering. He added that the partnership with Lonza will provide a "pharma-worthy" scalable GMP supply chain. PCV manufacturing, including conjugation development and microbial manufacturing, will be housed at Lonza's Visp, Switzerland facility.
von Emster said terms of the deal are undisclosed.
By establishing its GMP supply chain while PCV is still in preclinical development, the transition through the clinic and to market is expected to be smoother, according to von Emster. The lack of scalable manufacturing capabilities is a limitation many biotechs are saddled with, which decreases their attractiveness to potential acquirers that would be expected to provide such capabilities or allocate funds to build them.
At the time of its series B funding last March, Pickering told BioCentury SutroVax expected to file an IND for the program in 2019. On Thursday, he said the company is not providing updated guidance on the IND timeline, but expects the latest round to bring the program through Phase II testing.
In addition to PCV, SutroVax has multiple undisclosed programs in preclinical testing, according to Pickering.
Thursday's series C round brings SutroVax's total raised capital to over $170 million. SutroVax was spun out of Sutro Biopharma Inc. (South San Francisco, Calif.) in 2013 (see BioCentury, Nov. 3, 2014).
TPG’s Heath Lukatch will join SutroVax’s board as a member. Medicxi’s Francesco de Rubertis will join the board as an observer.