As MiroBio gears up for its first clinical trial, the autoimmune biotech is getting a new CEO: Carolin Barth, M.D., joins after a 17-year run at Novartis, where she most recently led commercial and pipeline strategy for cell and gene therapies.
Barth had been mulling a move from pharma to biotech “for a while,” having led teams on the R&D side as well as the commercial side of Novartis.
“I really wanted to marry those two things and had been starting to look into what kind of roles I could go into … When MiroBio reached out, I was absolutely intrigued by the idea of building a new class of medicines for autoimmune diseases,” Barth said.
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MiroBio wants to do for autoimmune disease what precision medicine has done for cancer treatment. Though the autoimmune field has evolved over the years, many treatments still aren’t specific enough. Rather than target individual pathways or cells, some of these medicines, such as TNF inhibitors, work more broadly, leading to safety concerns such as immunosuppression.
The company’s work is based on 15 years of research out of the University of Oxford and centers on checkpoint agonists. It has mapped more than 70 inhibitory checkpoint receptors and is working to understand the effects of these receptors on different cell types. With that understanding, the company engineers antibodies to dial up those pathways in a precise way.
While checkpoint inhibitors like Merck’s Keytruda “release the brake” on the immune system so it can fight cancer, checkpoint agonists are designed to boost the pathways that keep the immune system in check.
“In autoimmune disease, there is an imbalance in the inhibition of certain signals,” Barth said. “The body’s immune system is firing on all cylinders,” including against its own tissues, because the pathways that inhibit the immune response are dampened. MiroBio’s drugs are designed to combat this dampening and return those pathways to their normal function.
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The company’s lead program, MB272, targets the immune receptor BTLA and is slated to enter the clinic in early 2022. Following behind is MB151, which activates PD-1 and will begin human testing in 2022 or early 2023, Barth said.
MiroBio expects to have many more prospects to come.
“We want to further characterize and bring a couple of additional candidates from the research side into the translational side,” Barth said.
In 2022, Barth will also focus on putting together a financing and looking into potential partnerships.