Janssen alums' Aro Biotherapeutics takes aim at centyrins with $13M round

A pair of former Janssen R&D leaders founded Aro Biotherapeutics early this year to develop centyrins—small proteins that could potentially work like antibodies without the accompanying challenges. Now, Aro has raised $13 million to build its team and advance its centyrin pipeline, which includes a candidate for non-small cell lung cancer.

Aro started life with an initial start-up investment from Johnson & Johnson Innovation and BioMotiv. It has an exclusive license to centyrins discovered by cofounder and Chief Scientific Officer Karyn O’Neil, Ph.D., when she was at Janssen. Its lead asset, a bispecific centyrin, is in the lead optimization stage for advanced non-small cell lung cancer. Aro has a second asset in development: a centyrin-siRNA conjugate for other types of cancer.

"The reason we chose this particular structure is because after many years of experience working with monoclonal antibodies both in discovery and development, we were well aware of some of the challenges that come along with antibodies because they are very big, complex proteins," said Aro cofounder and CEO Sue Dillon, Ph.D. "That makes them difficult to reengineer and challenging to manufacture."

"Centyrins were designed de novo for the purpose of addressing some challenges found with monoclonal antibodies," O’Neil said. "The idea was to design something that had good stability, solubility and expression properties that would allow us to have something that was chemically much more simple than an antibody and give us a real lever to engineer multispecifics."

Since launch, Aro has built its team: Steve Nadler, Ph.D. as its VP of discovery and translational research, Derek Miller as chief business officer and Mark Laurenzi as VP of finance and operations. Aro’s team is now 11-strong, with a scientific advisory board and consultants in place as it advances its pipeline toward preclinical development.

Aro’s initial focus will be building a wholly owned pipeline in oncology before expanding into immunology, an area in which Dillon and Nadler both have extensive experience. And Aro is looking for partners to go beyond those two buckets: "We are talking with many potential partners and working with several companies on applications for centyrins," Dillon said.

Its next step is to get its lung cancer candidate into preclinical work.

"We are within a short time frame of doing so and will be able to begin our GMP manufacturing campaign in E. coli," Dillon said.

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