At the start of 2021, serial biotech entrepreneur Gary Glick revealed a mega-round of financing for his new precision oncology startup. Now he’s back at it again, bringing along some familiar investors who have joined forces to raise even more money—$218 million—for yet another startup he founded, Odyssey Therapeutics. That biotech is setting out with programs already in development in cancer and immunology.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
The Series A financing announced Tuesday was co-led by OrbiMed Advisors and SR One Capital Management. OrbiMed was one of the investors in Scorpion Therapeutics, the oncology biotech that closed $162 million in Series B funding earlier this year. Glick said he started thinking about Odyssey after leaving Scorpion in the spring. Conversations with Carl Gordon, managing partner of OrbiMed, set things in motion for the new Boston-based company, which in a matter of months has grown to more than 90 people working on seven drug programs.
“‘Odyssey’ is associated with a journey,” Glick said. “In some ways, this is a culmination of my journey in 30 years in bioscience.”
Though Glick is certainly a biotech entrepreneur, he notes that he does not have a big pharma background. For 16 years, he was a chemistry professor at the University of Michigan before forming his first company, Lycera, in 2006. With that company and the subsequent ones, Glick said that rather than focus on a drug discovery technology, his approach is to think about a medical problem and then identify the target to address that problem.
At Lycera, the goal was to develop oral drugs to treat autoimmune diseases, research that led to drug discovery partnerships with Merck. His next venture, IFM Therapeutics, aimed to enhance the activity of a type of immunotherapy called a checkpoint inhibitor. Bristol Myers Squibb acquired that research, but IFM Therapeutics continued with autoimmune drugs addressing two targets, the NLRP3 inflammasome and stimulator of interferon genes. In 2019, Novartis acquired an IFM subsidiary with a lead NLRP3-blocking program in development for the fatty liver disease nonalcoholic steatohepatitis.
Glick is not revealing Odyssey’s targets yet. But similar to his earlier endeavors, he said his new startup also aims to address and overcome limitations of currently available drugs. For one, many therapies only benefit certain patients or subsets of patients, he said. Drug resistance is another problem, with some patients completely resistant to therapy at the outset. The third problem Glick sees is toxicity. While advances have produced powerful new medicines, toxicity prevents patients from receiving their full benefit, he said. Some of Odyssey’s targets will be novel, and others will be pathways that have some clinical validation that mitigates risk. Glick said Odyssey won’t pursue targets addressed by an already approved drug.
“We’re working on areas that others have recognized but we’re taking different approaches where we’ve identified a gap in biology or something that others have missed,” Glick said.
One key difference between Odyssey and Glick’s previous ventures is the size of the financing. The Series A cash enables Odyssey to pursue multiple programs (all home grown) simultaneously. Glick noted that the company’s research includes target discovery. As the current programs progress to the clinic, new ones that address new targets will succeed them in the pipeline. That research is driven by Odyssey’s embrace of data—the company already employs 30 data scientists. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can help scientists understand the changes proteins undergo in real time and in the context of a particular disease. That understanding helps Odyssey scientists make better decisions and advance the best compounds for development, Glick said.
Odyssey’s drugs will mainly be small molecules, and to a limited extent, protein therapeutics. Though cancer and immunology have overlapped in Glick’s previous companies, that won’t be the case for Odyssey, at least not at first. Eventually, they will come together in immuno-oncology research, but “that’s a little bit in the future for us,” Glick said.
Partnerships with big pharma companies might also be in the future, though Glick said he won’t do a deal solely to get more cash. Odyssey is well capitalized by the Series A financing, whose other investors include Foresite Capital, Woodline Partners, Logos Capital, HBM Healthcare Investments, Colt Ventures, Creacion Ventures, and other undisclosed investment firms. Glick said Odyssey will pursue partnerships if it makes sense for the science, such as bringing capabilities that the startup does not have.
Photo by Odyssey Therapeutics
