Morningside Ventures has rolled up two of its own biotechs to spawn a new startup, combining an Irish microbiome business and a U.S. neutrophil biology specialist to create inflammatory disease player Adiso Therapeutics.
In unveiling Adiso, Hong Kong-based Morningside presented the startup as a company that just emerged from stealth, but the birthing of the biotech is more convoluted than that wording suggests. Adiso was incorporated in the U.K. late last year with Morningside listed as its sole shareholder. In January, Adiso filed more paperwork stating it was established to acquire Artugen Therapeutics.
Artugen was a Morningside-backed biotech that operated in plain sight for years, disclosing the start of a clinical trial in a press release in 2020 and being the subject of an Irish news report just last month. The news report covered a $5 million investment by Morningside that brought the total raised by the biotech up to $32 million.
As part of the takeover, Adiso has rebranded Artugen’s lead candidate ART24 as ADS024. The candidate is an oral single strain live biotherapeutic product that is in the clinic as a treatment of mild to moderate ulcerative colitis and as a way to prevent the recurrence of Clostridium difficile infection.
Adiso has also acquired Bacainn Therapeutics, another biotech funded by Morningside. Before being bought out, Bacainn ran a phase 1 clinical trial of BT051, an oral inhibitor of multidrug resistance protein 2 and formyl peptide receptor 1. The trial in healthy volunteers encouraged Bacainn to envision a future for BT051 in ulcerative colitis, an indication that may benefit from its targeting of neutrophil migration.
Now, Adiso has bought Bacainn and rebranded BT051 as ADS051. Bacainn began a phase 1 clinical trial of BT051 in subjects with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis late last year. Adiso’s third asset, ADS032, is an inhibitor of the inflammasomes NLRP3 and NLRP1. Bacainn was working on a preclinical inflammasome drug code-named BT032 before being bought by Adiso.