British cancer biotech Storm Therapeutics has secured $56m in a Series C financing round to push its sarcoma therapy, STC-15, further down the development pipeline.
This capital raise, which featured contributions from Pfizer Ventures, the Fast Track Initiative and Taiho Ventures – among others – will back the monotherapy element of Storm’s Phase II study (NCT06975293) of STC-15.
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This study recently dosed its first patient and is exploring the potential of the methyltransferase-like 3 (METTL3) inhibitor in patients with select, relapsed sarcoma subtypes. The second element of the study will evaluate STC-15’s promise alongside Junshi Biosciences’ checkpoint inhibitor, Loqtorzi (toripalimab), in patients with metastatic or advanced unresectable sarcomas.
The mid-stage study, Storm says, should support a potential accelerated approval pathway for STC-15, while establishing if the drug may show benefit in other cancer indications in the future.
STC-15 acts by inhibiting METTL3, an enzyme that modifies mRNA through methylation. As sarcomas tend to rely on METTL3-driven methylation for growth and survival, Storm hopes its lead candidate will demonstrate a strong anti-tumour effect in patients with sarcomas.
Addressing unmet needs in sarcoma
It is particularly challenging to treat patients with sarcomas due to the strong heterogeneity and rarity of the disease, as well as its muted response to traditional treatment options like chemotherapy.
While drugs have secured the regulatory greenlight within the broader sarcoma space, such as Adaptimmune’s metastatic synovial sarcoma gene therapy Tecelra (afamitresgene autoleucel), there are still several subtypes of the disease that have no approved targeted therapies, leaving patients with a shallow pool of treatment options.
This is particularly true for patients with epithelioid sarcoma, who now have no targeted treatment options available to them after Ipsen pulled Tazverik (tazemetostat) from the market. The Parisian pharma stopped selling the EZH2 blocker after a trial uncovered the drug’s potential to cause secondary malignancies.
In a bid to favourably shift the sarcoma treatment landscape, several companies are developing drugs, with 40 Phase III trials currently being conducted globally, as per GlobalData’s Pharmaceutical Intelligence Center. Modalities currently in testing include antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), fusion proteins, gene therapies, kinase inhibitors and more.
Of the drugs in late-stage development for sarcoma, Intensity Therapeutics’ INT230-6 has arguably piqued the most investor interest, as the company’s stock value soared over 400% when the drug demonstrated a disease control rate of 75% in adult patients with metastatic disease in more than 20 cancers – including sarcoma – in a Phase I/II study (NCT03058289). The company is now exploring the drug’s potential in the Phase III INVINCIBLE-3 trial, which is comparing the drug to the US standard of care (SoC).
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