San Diego based Janux Therapeutics Files for $100 Million Initial Public Offering

Janux Therapeutics filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission an initial public offering to raise $100 million. This comes about a month after the company closed on a Series B financing round worth $125 million.The San Diego-based company focuses on next-generation therapies built on its Tumor Activated T-Cell Engager technology platform. T-cell engagers are a new class of immunotherapies. They bind to a cancer cell and recruit the patient’s T-cells to attack the cancer cells. The company’s Tumor Activated T-Cell Engager technology is engineered to overcome limitations of current immuno-oncology T-cell therapies, primarily dose-limiting toxicities, poor pharmacokinetic profiles, and limited efficacy. Tumor Activated T-Cell Engager Should be better by integrating tumour-specific activation with crossover pharmacokinetics.

In preclinical research, the Tumor Activated T-Cell Engager compound candidates have shown comparative anti-tumor activity compared to standard T-cell engagers but do not have as many issues related to cytokine release, healthy tissue toxicities, or systemic immune activation.

Janux therapeutic raised $201 million from investors since its founding in 2017. It was founded in the Avalon Ventures accelerator, COI Pharmaceuticals, in San Diego. Its pipeline candidates are against specific tumor markers, PSMA, EGFR and TROP2.The Series B financing round was led by RA Capital Management and joined by new investors BVF Partners, EcoR1 Capital, Hartford Health Care Endowment, Janus Henderson Investors, Logos Capital, Samsara BioCapital, and Surveyor Capital. Existing investors also participated, including OrbiMed, Avalon Ventures, and Bregua.

At the time, Jake Simson, partner at RA Capital Management, stated that RA Capital believes that Janux’s proprietary technology has the potential to unlock the next generation of immunotherapies, and we are excited about the significant potential that this platform holds for a breadth of highly prevalent solid tumors. They are impressed with the preclinical data from Janux’s wholly-owned TRACTr drug candidates showing the potential to harness the potent tumor-killing properties of T cells.

Janux Therapeutics plans to use the funds raised from the Initial Public Offering to submit four Investigational New Drug applications to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the first half of 2022. The lead program is PSMA-TRACTr for metastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer. The next two are EGFR-TRACTr for colorectal cancer and head and neck cancer and TROP2-TRACTR for triple-negative breast cancer, urothelial cancer and non-small cell lung cancer. The least advanced program is Costim bispecific, targeting PC-L1xCD28 in solid tumors.