Joe Jimenez’s fund Aditum launches its 10th biotech, Celexor Bio, with autoimmune drug from Inmagene

The biotech licensing whizzes at Aditum Bio, the VC firm from ex-Novartis CEO Joe Jimenez and Mark Fishman, have created their 10th company by nabbing the rights to a preclinical autoimmune drug.

The new startup, Celexor Bio, will pay an undisclosed upfront and up to $287 million in biobucks to San Diego-based Inmagene Biopharmaceuticals, which will also get an equity stake in the new biotech and potential royalties.

Celexor comes out of Aditum’s second fund and emerges shortly after the biotech creator’s success with Versanis Bio, which took a former Novartis drug and turned it around as a weight loss candidate that caught Eli Lilly’s eye in an up to $1.9 billion acquisition this summer. Aditum’s last creation, immunology-focused Vitalli Bio, was revealed in April.

The latest bet, based in Oakland, CA, gets its hands on the exclusive global rights to an antibody going after immunoglobulin-like transcript 7, or ILT7. Celexor will rebrand the asset from IMG-018 to CLXR-901 and anticipates the deal will close before September ends, Inmagene said Thursday morning.

By targeting ILT7, a cell surface marker, Celexor hopes to go after plasmacytoid dendritic cells, or pDCs, which drum up inflammatory cytokines and are the culprits of various autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

“By directly depleting the pathological cells, CLXR-901 may offer a safe and effective alternative for these challenging disorders,” said Fishman, Aditum’s co-founder and previous president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research.

Praveena Kandula

Aditum partner Praveena Kandula will run Celexor as its president. In an interview, she said Aditum is fully funding Celexor and plans to take CLXR-901 into a “range of autoimmune” indications. She declined to disclose a timeline to the clinic, noting the upstart is mapping out plans.

Inmagene, which last disclosed a $100 million Series C in June 2021, is perhaps most known in biotech circles for another antibody it out-licensed. The Los Angeles biotech Acelyrin acquired the rights to Inmagene’s IL-17 inhibitor izokibep, save for certain Asian and Nordic regions, and raised heaps of private capital before a massive $540 million IPO in May on the backs of the treatment candidate’s potential. Izokibep flopped its first late-stage test earlier this month, but Acelyrin still has big ambitions with another Phase III already underway.

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