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Gaithersburg’s Salubris Biotherapeutics Inc. has clinched a fresh $35 million from its longtime backer to keep multiple clinical programs for heart failure and cancers moving forward, in what continues to be a difficult moment for biotech fundraising.
The local company, known as SalubrisBio, plans to use the capital to continue funding clinical development of its lead drug candidate, which it’s testing in heart failure, CEO Sam Murphy told me in an email. That phase 2 study just enrolled its first patient. The funding will also fuel other studies, including in solid tumors.
Following “promising findings” thus far, SalubrisBio is trying to ultimately get new treatment options to market “that can restore quality of life for heart failure patients,” among other things, he said in a statement.
It’s work that has sparked repeated investment from China’s Shenzhen Salubris Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. That public company has funneled more than $135 million to date into SalubrisBio, which is a wholly owned subsidiary. It’s also déjà vu for the company, which got a capital injection of the same amount around this time last year.
And it speaks to why this type of backing is precious in biotech, where companies must continually raise financing in the years, sometimes decades, often required to get through research and development — before a product can reach patients and start generating revenue.
Lately, the landscape has been that much tougher, with fewer deals across the board. And at the same time, private and public companies alike are scrapping plans and axing positions to preserve cash.
Immunomic Therapeutics Inc., a cancer therapy company based in Rockville, similarly has raised multiple batches of funding in recent years from a single investor, Korean investment group HLB Co. Immunomic’s progress has hinged on those infusions as it waited for the capital markets to turn, as it considered various exit options while waiting for the capital markets to improve, its late CEO, Bill Hearl, who died in February, had told us last year.
SalubrisBio, founded in 2016, now counts 31 employees. Murphy joined the biotech in 2017 to spearhead business development after more than a decade of consulting at multiple firms including Boston’s IMS Consulting Group, which later became part of Durham, North Carolina, clinical research services and analytics firm Iqvia Inc.
