Apogee files to go public, unveiling IL-13 ambitions and more

Apogee Therapeutics launched last year with $169 million in private financing and is headed for an IPO.

The startup was spun out of Paragon Therapeutics in December but with few details about exactly what targets it would go after. Thursday’s IPO filing provides some details.

Its drug APG777 is an under-the-skin mAb targeting IL-13 and will enter a healthy volunteer study in Australia in the second half of this year. If the data are positive, it will go into a Phase II trial in atopic dermatitis. It also has APG808, a mAb targeting IL-4Rα for COPD.

Those targets, plus others in Apogee’s pipeline, put Sanofi’s Dupixent and Eli Lilly’s lebrikizumab on its radar. Lilly’s drug is up for FDA and European approval decisions later this year for atopic dermatitis, and Sanofi and Regeneron’s Dupixent is already cleared for the condition.

The IPO filing also marks a busy week for the Paragon family. Earlier in the day Thursday, the antibody engineering company’s offshoot Spyre Therapeutics went public in a reverse merger with Aeglea BioTherapeutics.

Both Apogee and Spyre are immunology- and inflammation-focused startups that have launched into a field getting renewed life with deal after deal in recent quarters, including Merck’s purchase of Prometheus and Amgen’s proposed Horizon deal.

Apogee is focused on atopic dermatitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and other indications in the space. The expected size and timing of the initial public offering weren’t specified in the filing, though the Boston-area and San Francisco biotech plans to list on Nasdaq as APGE.

If successful in gathering investor support, Apogee would be one of a handful of biotechs to make a leap onto Wall Street this year in a traditional IPO, where investor appetite for new public companies has been cool. The doors aren’t fully shut: autoimmune biotech Acelyrin closed a $621 million IPO last month.

The company is betting its candidates can make a difference through their dosing frequency.

With APG777, the company is looking at a bevy of other indications after atopic dermatitis: asthma, alopecia areata, chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps, chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU), eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) and prurigo nodularis (PN), according to the SEC filing. In maintenance dosing, Apogee expects the drug to be given every two or three months.

And with APG808, Apogee hopes its drug can be delivered subcutaneously at rates less frequent than others, aiming for every six weeks or two months in maintenance dosing. A development candidate is expected next year.

More eczema meds are on the horizon, including OX40L-targeted APG990 and IL-13 and OX40L-targeted APG222.

Peter Harwin

Venrock Healthcare Capital and Fairmount Funds founded the biotech last year. Other funders include Deep Track Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, affiliates of OrbiMed and RA Capital Management, Perceptive Xontogeny Venture Fund, RTW Investments and Wellington Management. Fairmount founded Apogee’s parent, Paragon, in 2021 and has a partnership with FairJourney Biologics.

The company is led by Michael Henderson, who left the chief business officer post at BridgeBio last September. Around the same time, medical chief Carl Dambkowski joined from the same role at QED Therapeutics. The finance chief is Jane Pritchett Henderson, who led finances at Adagio Therapeutics when the biotech closed a $355 million IPO in August 2021. The biotech’s Covid-19 antibody hit a snag against the Omicron variant, and the company rebranded to Invivyd last year but is still working against the coronavirus.

Apogee’s chair is Peter Harwin, a managing member at Fairmount Funds who joined the board this month.

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