For Missoula’s Inimmune, a $22 M Series A Round with Two Bear Capital is the latest record set
The biotech lab partners with UM to address COVID-19, eyes clinical trials
By Martina Pansze
Missoula-based vaccine and immunotherapeutics company Inimmune is working closely with the University of Montana to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Bitterroot Valley's vaccine history traces back to the turn of the 20th century as scientists and doctors in the area were researching Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Photo via Inimmune.
In July 2020, Missoula-based biotech therapeutics company Inimmune Corporation announced the largest Series A investment in Montana history: a $22 million round led by Two Bear Capital out of Whitefish.
Founded in 2016, Inimmune develops vaccines and immunotherapeutics in allergy, autoimmunity, infectious disease, opioid addiction and cancer with multiple candidates rapidly advancing to Phase I human clinical trials in the next 1-2 years. The company designs, formulates, and evaluates vaccines and immunotherapeutic drugs in their Missoula lab to effectively span the space from pre-clinical discovery to clinical testing.
The Series A investment came a month after the biopharmaceutical firm received $2 million from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases in June. In partnership with UM's Center for Translational Medicine, Inimmune has received over $30 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) contracts and grants since its founding.
The Two Bear Capital funding will advance at least two lead programs to Phase I clinical trials that are expected to kick off in early to mid-2022. Implementing human testing will transition Inimmune into a clinical stage company rather than solely executing preclinical research.
“Our technology is based on finding things that stimulate the immune response in very specific ways,” said Inimmune President and CEO Dr. Jay Evans in an MHTBA webinar last Spring. “We do this through looking for patterns that happen in nature, viruses and bacteria that stimulate innate immune responses. We use those compounds in combination with vaccines to boost the right type of immune response to increase the efficacy and safety of a vaccine or immunotherapy.”
Adjuvants are components added to vaccines to stimulate an improved response. Essentially, they spur a boost of antibodies that result in longer-lasting immunity. Adjuvant agents and their cell delivery platforms are a critical aspect of the novel research being done in Inimmune’s labs. With the recent funding, the Inimmune team plans to advance a stable adjuvant delivery system that prompts an immune response against infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Dr. David Burkhart and Dr. Shannon Miller will lead the adjuvant delivery system program through clinical evaluation.
The Inimmune team has been developing the two assets that are set to advance to trials for several years. One of the novel treatments is an allergy drug, and the second is an immuno-oncology therapy.
The immuno-oncology compound was initially created as a vaccine adjuvant at the University of Montana, but researchers at Inimmune utilized it to boost the immune system during cancer treatments and licensed the compound from UM.
The agreement is just one aspect of a close partnership between Inimmune and the University of Montana.
Evans is also the Director for the Center for Translational Medicine at UM, which was founded alongside Inimmune in January 2016 as a public/private partnership to bring jobs and funding to the Missoula research community.
This September, the Center for Translational Medicine was awarded a five-year, $33.4 million NIH award—the largest in the University’s history—to develop and perform clinical trials of opioid vaccines in collaboration with Inimmune, where the company will handle the project’s manufacturing as a corporate partner.
The Center has seen much more success than Evans ever imagined, bringing roughly $97 million in grants and contracts to the University since its inception. In 2020, University of Montana was listed as one of the 10 Best Universities Solving the Coronavirus Pandemic by Successful Student alongside Oxford, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins.
Inimmune is housed in UM’s business incubator MonTEC (Montana Technology Enterprise Center), just across the Clark Fork River from the university’s main campus.
COVID-19 Response
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the University and Inimmune pivoted part of their research operations to focus on vaccine development. The University launched a program in February 2020 to identify and advance a COVID-19 vaccine candidate in partnership with Inimmune. In April, the NIH awarded $3.7 million for these COVID-19 vaccine research efforts. The lead candidate vaccines are being tested in animal trials in collaboration with NYC-based Mount Sinai Health Systems and the Boston Children’s Hospital.
At this point in the pandemic, however, most of Inimmune’s COVID efforts are taking place in the University of Montana labs. Inimmune and UM are screening regiments with types of COVID vaccines, and reporting those results to the NIH to help them make decisions on next steps.
“We know that the [Moderna and Pfizer] mRNA vaccines being deployed are 95% effective and appear to be well-tolerated,” said Evans. “But nobody knows what the durability of that response will be. Or the breadth of that response, or whether we'll be able to prevent these new variants of COVID that have begun circulating.”
To investigate those questions, Inimmune and the University of Montana are looking at methods to stimulate the immune response to a COVID-19 vaccine to generate a more durable and longer-lasting immune response for possible next generation vaccines.
With its key principals being research faculty at the University, Inimmune has helped to drive the incredible growth of UM’s research enterprise.
“The Center for Translational Medicine has grown to include a number of research faculty at UM who now have additional support in bringing their research to commercialization,” said Scott Whittenburg, the Vice President for Research and Creative Scholarship at UM. “Inimmune and [the Center for Translational Medicine] have helped UM become recognized as a leading university for addressing the COVID virus.”
Whittenburg also noted that UM’s partnership with Inimmune provides a growing base of students who will provide the foundation for the workforce these companies need.
Evans agreed. “The Center gives us a great training opportunity for students, we hire a lot of undergraduates in our labs at the University and a lot of our new hires at Inimmune come from our staff there, and then we backfill it and hire more students, and graduate students, and post-docs to fill those positions,” he said. “We're our own recruiting agency by having such a strong connection with University.”
Even if they studied elsewhere, almost all of Inimmune’s hires have connections to Montana or Missoula.
“That connection is really strong,” said Evans. “It seems like once people lived here, the pull to come back is very strong."
The ‘Schoolhouse Lab’ that predates the NIH facility in the Bitterroot Valley. The first iteration of the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever vaccine was developed in the abandoned schoolhouse. Photo via National Institute of Health.
A Century in the Making
Inimmune’s bioscience and vaccine development traces back to the turn of the 20th century as scientists and doctors in the area were researching Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
Also known as ‘black measles,’ spotted fever is a tick-spread bacteria that has an untreated death rate of more than 80%. In the ‘00s and 1910s, Heavy logging in the Bitterroot Valley created shrub vegetation for ticks to thrive, spurring devastating outbreaks.
Rogue doctors and scientists investigated the mysterious disease in crude laboratories built in cabins, farmhouses, and wood sheds. Eventually, the growing medical research community rented an abandoned schoolhouse. In ‘The Schoolhouse Lab,’ two leading researchers developed the fever’s first vaccine by grinding up ticks carrying the disease.
The Governor established a research center in 1926 outside of Hamilton after his daughter and son-in-law died of the fever. The facility met resistance among a few Hamilton residents who feared the disease would escape the lab or worsen the outbreak.
The facility, dubbed Rocky Mountain Laboratories, was acquired by the National Institute of Health in 1937 and used as a vaccine factory for soldiers during World War II. To this day, Rocky Mountain Labs (RML) operates under the NIH as an intramural campus, and the facility’s 400 employees study the world’s most dangerous pathogens. In recent months, researchers have been investigating coronavirus vaccine treatments and used electron microscopes to capture the most accurate images of the virus to date.
In 1981, one of the lead investigators at RML, Edgar Ribi, developed a novel detoxification process to create a vaccine adjuvant. From that discovery, he launched a company out of his garage in Hamilton called Ribi Immunochem Research. In a domino effect of acquisitions, Ribi Immunochem grew until it was bought by Seattle-based Corixa in 1999 for $54 million, followed six years later by British pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) for $300 million.
Evans moved to Hamilton in 2001 to work for Corixa before it became GSK. Corporate reorganization shuttered GSK’s Hamilton vaccine lab in 2015, but Evans and 14 of his colleagues wanted to continue their research and development efforts from Montana rather than relocate to the east coast.
In 2016, Evans and co-founders Drs. Kendal Ryter, Helene Bazin-Lee, and David Burkhart established Inimmune along with a team of 11 additional former GSK researchers. Inimmune was featured on the MHTBA’s 2018 Startups to Watch List. Since then, they have expanded and accelerated their drug discovery pipeline with lead programs in immuno-oncology, allergy, opioid addiction vaccines and infectious disease vaccines.
Inimmune has grown to 30 employees with numerous collaborators around the globe. In total, the vaccine research team (both UM and Inimmune) has grown to 60 researchers focused on the discovery and development of novel vaccines and immunotherapy.
Growing an Ecosystem
Two Bear Capital Managing Partner Michael Goguen spent two decades at Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital—where he led 54 company investments to a total market value exceeding $64 billion—before founding Two Bear Capital out of Whitefish in 2019.
Goguen is keen on investing in biotech and bioinformatics, and Inimmune’s Series A round is the latest testament to Montana’s burgeoning biotech ecosystem. Of the MHTBA’s list of 11 Montana Biotech Companies to Watch in 2021, four have raised venture capital investment, and two—Truwl and FYR Diagnostics—are also funded through Two Bear.
“From COVID-19 to cancer, the ability to harness and direct the human immune system will be a critical part of the fight against the most devastating diseases faced by humanity," said Goguen. "Inimmune's expertise in immune modulation, formulation, delivery, and trial design will keep them at the forefront of the fight and we are honored to be partners with such a proven scientific powerhouse."
Goguen joined the Board of Directors of Inimmune this fall.
“We could have looked outside of Montana for investors but were happy to find a local VC firm that connected with our vision to grow a world-class biotech company right here in Montana,” Evans told the Flathead Beacon in July.
During Evans’ time at GSK, there were very few other bioscience companies in the state. Just in the last few years, though, he noted that the bio sector in Montana has grown enormously.
“Whether it's Two Bear or Next Frontier, there's now some people looking into capital investments in the state in the biotech space and high tech space. And that's really changing the look of the industry,” said Evans.
Last month, Tonix Pharmaceuticals announced plans to construct a vaccine development and commercial scale manufacturing facility on a 44-acre plot of land in Hamilton.
COVID-19 has planted vaccine and emerging disease research in the spotlight and accelerated biotech growth by bringing in millions in federal funding. Four Montana companies were awarded SBIR/STTR grants in 2020, securing more NIH awards than any other state.
“I'd say that's the one positive thing that's come out of COVID - the more research dollars that are coming into the system,” said Evans.
About the Publisher: Launched in 2014, the Montana High Tech Business Alliance is an nonpartisan nonprofit association of highly-engaged high tech and manufacturing companies and affiliates creating high-paying jobs in Montana. For more information, visit MTHighTech.org or subscribe to our biweekly newsletter.
About the Author:
Martina Pansze is the Communications Director for the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. She graduated from Whitman College with a degree in Film and Media Studies.