Maxion Therapeutics’ CEO says Series A fundraiser gaining strong investor interest

Maxion Therapeutics’ Series A fundraising round is well under way, says CEO Arndt Schottelius, who assumed the role on 1 March, enabling co-founder and science avatar – CAT, IONTAS – John McCafferty to transition to CTO.

Arndt is one of those trusty scientists sometimes described as an “industry veteran” and he certainly has a compelling story to tell both as a physician and a businessman.

As a medical doctor with an MD and PhD from the University of Freiburg, he has been successfully bridging the gap between research and clinical development for 25 years and has advanced numerous therapies towards FDA approval.

His stock-in-trade is building pre-clinical and clinical organisations and portfolios, and he’s achieved this multiple times. Initially – at the start of the century – he was at Schering AG (now part of Bayer) as a senior scientist. He then joined Genentech as a director in 2005, became MorphoSys’ first chief development officer in 2008, became executive VP and head of R&D at Kymab in 2017, and had been CSO at Affimed since 2020, prior to joining Maxion.“I was so intrigued with the quality of the team,” Dr Schottelius says of the motivation to join – and lead – Maxion, “and the ambition to drive the programmes into the clinic and to generate clinical data.”

Noting that Maxion was highly commended in the hard-fought ‘Employer of the Year’ category at the Cambridge Independent’s 2024 Science & Technology Awards, he adds: “There is a really strong entrepreneurial culture here, the team loves to work here. I take little credit, John and Aneesh are developing world-class science which attracts highly talented scientists and they are enabling and empowering people.”

Dr Aneesh Karatt Vellatt (also a co-founder of IONTAS) is the CSO as well as a co-founder of Maxion Therapeutics, and co-inventor of the KnotBody technology with Dr McCafferty, whose earlier antibody phage display research at CAT led to the development of Humira, the world’s best-selling drug. Dr McCafferty’s work was recognised in 2018 when co-inventor, Sir Greg Winter, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

There’s no doubt about the groundbreaking science taking place at the Maxions’s Unity Campus headquarters. Its proprietary KnotBody platform is now developing antibodies to treat autoimmune diseases (AID) and other diseases with high unmet clinical need.

“I feel very excited about being here,” Arndt says, speaking from The Works at Unity Campus. “There’s great science, and balanced risk-taking…. As a physician I was really impressed with the scientific leadership, and this groundbreaking technology has great potential for patients. What’s different here is that it’s a totally novel technology that can solve a long-standing problem in our industry. From the data we have generated so far I am confident that this groundbreaking technology can deliver very meaningful new therapies for patients in need.”

He adds: “So yes, John is now CTO and this is all part of a long-planned succession driven by John to get the company to the next stage, by handing over the helm to someone who has broad drug development experience – from discovery to pre-clinical and clinical drug development.”

Maxion’s ion channel-targeting solution passed its first major funding hurdle in 2023.

“In February last year we raised the pre-Series A of $15m, plus $2.5m grant funding, and the company grew from eight to 30 people at Unity Campus in Pampisford,” says Arndt. “We’re very happy here, having moved from Babraham last summer. We have great offices, spacious labs, and they’ve made some great infrastructure improvements here.

“It’s been quite a big transformation. We are building our teams and organisation, we understand diseases better, we understand translational biology better, and we are applying this knowledge by translating our findings into clinical studies in patients.”

Now all eyes are on the finance round, which the Cambridge Independent can reveal is already “well under way”, says Arndt, adding: “The initial launch of the Series A round is all about meeting investors and presenting them with the fantastic opportunity represented by Maxion’s KnotBody technology to generate a new class of drugs.”

The investor outreach programme indeed kicked off in the US earlier this month, when Maxion’s leadership team – CEO, CSO, CTO plus principal scientist Verity Jackson – went to Boston, Massachusetts, for the PEGS Boston conference also known as ‘The Essential Protein and Antibody Engineering Summit’. There, Verity spoke about the progress towards developing safe, efficacious and long-acting drugs against previously undruggable targets in a presentation titled ‘KnotBodies – Creating Ion Channel Modulating Antibodies by Fusing Knottins into Antibody Loops’.

“We spent a full week in Boston,” notes Arndt of the team’s participation. “Verity’s presentation was very well received and we also used the conference to speak to many people in our networks about our technology and programmes.”

The target figure has not yet been announced.

“What we can share, that’s even more important, is the purpose – we are looking for quite a substantial raise to bring our lead programme to early clinical proof of concept, which is a major value inflection point.

“We’re really gearing up to move our molecules into the clinic,” he concludes.

“We expect a 50 per cent growth in the next couple of years. We’re growing very thoughtfully, all of us have a broad network of people that we know.

“We’re getting ready to become a fully-grown drug development company.”