Amyloid disease therapy and diagnostic company AltPep announced today it has completed a $52.9 million Series B financing round that will help further its efforts to develop Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease treatments and diagnostics.
The proceeds from the investment, led by Senator Investment Group, LP, will be used to accelerate the company’s SOBIN therapeutics into Phase I clinical trials for both diseases. The funds will also be used for furthering the development of its first SOBA diagnostic which has garnered a Breakthrough Designation from the FDA which shows promise of identifying AD and Parkinson’s before symptoms appear.
“This new funding bolsters our efforts to bring early detection and treatment to patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases,” said Valerie Daggett, PhD, AltPep founder and CEO. “AltPep continues to reach significant milestones, including recent preclinical in vivo data demonstrating an improvement in cognitive deficits with our lead compound for Alzheimer’s disease. Also, our SOBA assay targeting toxic oligomers, which are early molecular triggers of disease, shows great potential for detection of Alzheimer’s disease.”
AltPep was founded in 2021 as a spinout company from the Daggett Research Group at the University of Washington. Daggett’s lab is currently focused on better understanding protein folding and how it contributes to disease development using both experimental and computational approaches. The lab has developed a database to simulate all known protein folds called Dynameomics, which the lab says is the largest collection of simulations and protein structures in the world.
An important part of this collection are simulations of protein unfolding related to amyloidogenesis, which revealed a non-standard secondary structure of proteins and peptides, the lab calls α-sheet. “We proposed that α-sheet structure is linked to toxicity during amyloidogenesis, and have developed an α-sheet library to test our peptide inhibitor designs in 1) mammalian amyloid disease systems, and 2) bacteria that use amyloid fibrils for biofilm stability to evade the host immune response and antibiotics. Our compounds inhibit aggregation and toxicity by binding the toxic oligomers that form en route to mature amyloid,” notes the Daggett Research Group website.
In a research paper published in December in PNAS, the Daggett lab reported that the test they developed, the SOBA assay, has the ability to measure the levels of amyloid beta oligomers in blood samples. The research shows that the SOBA test could detect oligomers in the blood of Alzheimer’s patients, but also detect them in the blood samples of 11 people in a control group who showed no signs of cognitive impairment. Follow up exams for 10 of these people showed they were all diagnosed years later with mild cognitive impairment or brain pathology consistent with Alzheimer’s disease, point toward the tests ability as an early detection tool.
“What clinicians and researchers have wanted is a reliable diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease—and not just an assay that confirms a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, but one that can also detect signs of the disease before cognitive impairment happens. That’s important for individuals’ health and for all the research into how toxic oligomers of amyloid beta go on and cause the damage that they do,” Daggett noted at the time of the publication. “What we show here is that SOBA may be the basis of such a test.”
AltPep is now developing these capabilities and its library of customized, synthetic peptides to both detect amyloid diseases much earlier than can be done now, but also to development treatments using these peptides to bind to toxic oligomers to neutralize them early in the progress of disease development.
“We believe AltPep is in an excellent position to optimize the value of its unique technology,” said Rohit Vanjani equity advisor at Senator Investment Group, who has also joined the AltPep board. “With scientific application for both therapeutics and diagnostics in a wide range of amyloid diseases, the potential for the company’s pipeline is vast and extremely promising.”
Additional investors in the Series B include Section 32, Partners Investment, and Eli Lilly and Company. Ronald DeMattos, PhD, senior vice president and CSO of Neurobiologics at Lilly will join the company’s scientific advisory board.
