Exclusive: Briggs Morrison’s Crossbow Therapeutics nabs $80M from MPM, Pfizer Ventures, Lilly in hunt for better cancer drugs

Briggs Morrison is ready to take on cancer with a new arsenal of antibodies that his biotech hopes will be more precise and tumor-killing than previous immunotherapies.

Crossbow Therapeutics has reeled in an $80 million Series A led by founder MPM BioImpact alongside Pfizer Ventures, with funds also coming from Eli Lilly, Polaris Partners, BVF Partners and Mirae.

Patrick Baeuerle

MPM’s Patrick Baeuerle, Todd Foley and Geraldine Paulus founded the Cambridge, MA-based biotech to make new therapies that go after the peptide-loaded major histocompatibility complexes, or pMHCs, on cancer cells. They’re specifically going after intracellular cancer targets, even secreted proteins, which Crossbow hopes will broaden the reach of antibodies, said Morrison, the CEO.

The Series A will likely bankroll the biotech through the end of 2025, and get at least one program to the IND stage, Morrison told Endpoints News. He envisions a range of possibilities for delivering the antibodies: CD3 T cell engager, NK cell engager, or, maybe on the partnering side, using them as binders for cell therapy approaches, antibody-drug conjugates or radio conjugates, he added. Baeuerle, an MPM executive partner, helped create T cell engagers as science chief at Micromet, a biotech bought by Amgen for about $1 billion a decade ago.

“My first reaction was, ‘Boy, there are a lot of targets we could go after,” Morrison said. “And I thought, ‘If there’s a company that’s getting set up where your first task is to actually prioritize the huge number of targets you can go after, that sounds like a very attractive opportunity.’”

Morrison recently left an eight-year stint at Syndax Pharmaceuticals, departing as head of R&D after multiple years as CEO. His drug development chops run deep, having served as chief medical officer at AstraZeneca for a period in the early 2010s and roles at Pfizer and Merck prior to that. Also in the C-suite is science chief Dmitri Wiederschain, who left the same post at Jounce Therapeutics in March as that company went through a sale. About 20 people work at Crossbow, Morrison said.

Crossbow’s early-stage pipeline will be a mix of “reasonably well-validated targets” and other, proprietary ones, the CEO said. Some will be kept close to the chest and others could go the partnering route, hinting at the luxury of Pfizer and Lilly scientists already having vetted their technology as part of the Big Pharma’s investment due diligence.

“What I like to call the killing half of the molecule, there’s lots of opportunity,” Morrison said. “The critical piece is to get that binder that recognizes the cancer cells so specifically.”

The killing half is expected to be quite powerful.

“Back in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church actually outlawed crossbows because they were so lethal, and we thought, ‘What a perfect [name].’ We want super-accurate therapies that only bind to cancer cells but not normal cells, and we want them to kill cancer cells.”

It will be more than a year before trial investigators shoot Crossbow’s so-called tumor bolts into humans, Morrison said.

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