Thousand Oaks-based gene therapy company Capsida Therapeutics Inc. has signed a multi-year partnership deal with a subsidiary of pharma giant Eli Lilly and Co. to develop genetic medicines for serious diseases.
Separately, Capsida also announced this month longtime pharma industry financial executive Julie Hakim as its new chief financial officer. She succeeds Pamela Wapnick, who left in June and is now chief financial officer for Irvine-based medical device company Diality Inc.
Capsida Biotherapeutics was founded in 2019 by California Institute of Technology neuroscience lab students Nick Goeden and Nicholas Flytzanis. It’s a gene therapy-platform company that through intravenous delivery of a single engineered capsid can target single or multiple organs simultaneously, while limiting exposure to non-targeted organs.
The term capsid refers to the protein shell that surrounds a virus. An engineered capsid can be used to deliver a drug to a very small target in a diseased organ, limiting harm to surrounding tissue and reducing unwanted side effects. Capsida uses an adeno-associated virus platform to engineer the capsid. (Adenoviruses are the principal cause of the common cold.)
Capsida’s drug pipeline consists of therapies for multiple neurologic diseases. These can include Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral palsy, Bell’s palsy and multiple sclerosis. This focus can be traced to the lab work that Goeden and Flytzanis did at Caltech under the tutelage of Viviana Gradinaru, director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at the Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. Gradinaru was a co-founder of Capsida Biotherapeutics and has been a longtime board member.
Capsida’s partnership deal announced on Jan. 4 is with Prevail Therapeutics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Indianapolis-based pharma giant Eli Lilly. Prevail’s focus is also on developing gene therapies to treat diseases of the central nervous system. But unlike Capsida, Prevail has almost unlimited resources, since it can tap into its parent, Eli Lilly, which posted $28 billion in revenue in 2021.
Under terms of the partnership, Capsida will receive $55 million consisting of an upfront payment and a commitment (from Prevail) to participate in the company (Capsida)’s next financing round, plus the potential to receive up to $685 million in research and development and commercial milestones as well as tiered royalties.
In addition, for one of the programs under the collaboration, Capsida will have an option to participate in development and commercialization in the U.S. in exchange for a gross margin share in that program.
For all programs, Capsida will lead capsid discovery efforts using its adeno-associated virus engineering and screening platform and Prevail will be responsible for preclinical and investigational new drug-enabling studies with therapeutic payloads.
“We are thrilled to be entering into this strategic collaboration with Prevail,” Peter Anastasiou, Capsida’s chief executive, said in the announcement. “Prevail’s expertise in neuroscience, gene therapy R&D, and access to Lilly’s world-class commercialization capabilities complements Capsida’s fully integrated approach, including our next-generation AAV engineering platform.”
For its part, Prevail also addressed the complementary nature of the two companies.
“Their expertise and capabilities complement our innovative approaches, and together we aspire to unlock the full potential of gene therapy technologies to help patients who are most in need of treatments,” Mansuo Shannon, Prevail’s chief scientific officer, said in the announcement.
Pharma finance veteran
As Capsida’s new CFO, Hakim brings more than 25 years of experience in financial executive roles at pharmaceutical companies.
Prior to joining Capsida, Hakim was chief financial officer at St. Louis-based Sequoia Vaccines Inc., which makes vaccines to treat various bacterial infections. Before that, she was a financial executive at Copenhagen, Denmark-based biopharma company Lundbeck, which specializes in therapies for brain diseases.
“In her very successful career as a financial executive, Julie has demonstrated expertise in many areas of finance and business – including R&D, product launches, revenue growth, acquisitions, integrations, and workforce expansions,” Anastasiou, Capsida’s chief executive, said in the company’s Jan. 18 announcement.