Scorpion spin-off Antares launches with $177 million

Antares Therapeutics has launched with $177 million in series A financing and a staff already at full speed, according to CEO Adam Friedman. The company is a spin-off of Scorpion Therapeutics, which in January of this year sold itself and its PI3Kα inhibitor program, STX-478, to Eli Lilly and Company for up to $2.5 billion.

Friedman says that “through the transaction process, we had the opportunity to spin out the capabilities, the pipeline, and, importantly, the team that was not associated with the lead program. And when that opportunity arose in the deal process, we absolutely took it.”

It appears to be business as usual for the team that transitioned from Scorpion to Antares. Despite the recent changes, Friedman says “the research and development team have not missed a beat” working on the small-molecule programs. The company still has some Scorpion branding on its walls for now, he adds.

“When many companies close a series A and get started, it’s like a train leaving the station, where it takes time to build a team and learn the technology. Antares is really like a train moving at full speed,” Friedman says.

Antares’s mission, much like Scorpion’s, is to develop small molecules capable of targeting what historically have been considered undruggable targets that are associated with disease. Scorpion’s focus was on oncology, but Friedman says that Antares is pursuing opportunities outside that with some of its molecules in development.

The company isn’t ready to reveal exactly what diseases it's targeting, only that it's hoping to get one of its molecules in development into clinical trials next year.

What Friedman would say is that Antares will continue to use the approaches developed by Scorpion to flesh out its drug discovery program, including using proprietary chemical proteomics and machine learning pipelines to find molecule binding pockets in target proteins.

Antares will continue Scorpion’s collaboration with AstraZeneca and has sold the worldwide rights to two epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitors for non-small-cell lung cancer to former Scorpion partner Pierre Fabre Laboratories.