Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Millendo Therapeutics announced Tuesday morning it has raised a venture capital round of $62 million, the largest VC round for a drug development company in Michigan history.
The company simultaneously announced an exclusive licensing agreement with the London-based pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to continue human trials and commercialization of a drug it has developed to fight polycystic ovary syndrome, the most common endocrine disease in women.
The previous funding record was set in 2014 by Plymouth Township-based ProNAi Therapeutics Inc. when it raised a round of $59.5 million. Last July, the company had an initial public offering of $158 million.
The name “Millendo” is a new name for an established company. It was adopted Tuesday by the company formerly known as Atterocor Inc.
An immediate use of capital will be an upfront payment to AstraZeneca for rights to its drug, which had the working title of AZD4901, changed now to MLE4901 as Millendo continues phase-two human trials.
As part of the partnership, AstraZeneca will also take an equity stake in Millendo.
“I wanted a new name for the company. Atterocor was continually misspelled and mispronounced,” Millendo President and CEO Julia Owens told Crain's on Monday. “The new name is a tribute to our past and our future.”
Owens said the “Mill” portion is an homage to Millie Schembechler, the wife of the legendary University of Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler.
After Millie died from adrenal cancer in 1992, Bo helped fund the Millie Schembechler Adrenal Cancer Program at UM, which was founded in 1993. Gary Hammer, M.D., one of Atterocor's co-founders, holds the Millie Schembechler professorship in adrenal cancer at UM.
The other half of the name, “endo,” is a reference to the company's focus on endocrine-related diseases.
Atterocor, a UM spinoff founded in 2012, got its first VC funding that year of $16 million to conduct phase-one human trials of an adrenal cancer drug with the working name of ATR-101 at the Comprehensive Cancer Center at UM and at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas in Houston.
Adrenal cancer is rare but lethal, often leading to death within a year of a patient's diagnosis.
The company's other co-founder, Raili Kerppola, a triathlete and marathon runner, was diagnosed with stage-four adrenal cancer late in 2010 and given less than a year to live. She began to attack adrenal cancer as it was attacking her, examining possible ways drugs could fight it.
She beat the odds by living with the disease for 2½ years, but she didn't live long enough to meet one of her major goals: see the drug she helped discover being administered to patients in human trials.
Kerppola died in June 2013 at age 51.
Adrenal cancer, also known as adrenocortical carcinoma, is diagnosed in 500-600 patients in the U.S. each year, and about 1,000 patients in the U.S. are in treatment at a given time.
To broaden its possible market, Atterocor subsequently began nonhuman clinical trials of ATR-101 for two other conditions: congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a recessive gene defect, and endogenous Cushing's syndrome, a disease caused by a chronic excess of cortisol.
Owens said she hopes to have clinical proof of concept for both uses later this year, with human trials to follow.
“This acquisition of MLE4901 combined with the new funding and our current programs around ATR-101 put us on a new trajectory to build a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on multiple disease-modifying treatments for endocrine disorders caused by hormone dysregulation,” Owens said in a news release.
The financing was led by Chevy Chase, Md.-based New Enterprise Associates.
New investors included San Francisco-based Roche Venture Fund; Chicago-based Adams Street Partners; Seattle-based Altitude Life Science Ventures; Boston-based Longwood Fund; Ann Arbor-based Renaissance Venture Capital Fund; and Boston-based Leerink Partners LLC.
Also joining this round were previous investors — Seattle-based Frazier Healthcare Partners; Bala Cynwyd, Pa.-based Osage University Partners; Menlo Park, Calif.-based 5AM Ventures; and UM under the MINTS program (Michigan Investment in New Technology Startups).
MLE4901 was developed on AstraZeneca's open innovation platform, which begins clinical development of compounds that do not fall under AstraZeneca's R&D core focus areas.
When studies yield positive results, AstraZeneca looks for partners to bring the drugs to market.
