You don’t hear about special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) mergers too much these days, but Medera is set to change that as the cardiovascular-disease-focused biotech dusts off this lesser-used pathway to the public markets.
Medera’s founders and key shareholders have committed around $22.6 million to the reverse merger with Nasdaq-listed Keen Vision Acquisition, a SPAC that had listed the biotech industry as one of its fields of interest.
Keen Vision is bringing around $149.5 million to the party, which will contribute to the combined company’s implied initial enterprise value of $622.6 million. The merger is set to close in the fourth quarter on the condition that Medera has over $40 million in available liquidity.
“Achieving a Nasdaq listing will allow Medera to be better positioned for advancing our various clinical and preclinical programs, enabling more efficient development aimed at bringing novel therapeutic solutions to patients with unmet needs,” Medera CEO and Founder Ronald Li, Ph.D., said in the Sept. 5 release.
Medera’s Sardocor unit has three adeno-associated-virus-based cardiac gene therapies in phase 1/2a trials, headed up by SRD-001. That drug is aimed at heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, and the study is due to complete in the fourth quarter before a phase 2b portion kicks off “shortly after.”
There’s also SRD-002, a drug aimed at heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), as well as SRD-003, which is looking at Duchenne muscular dystrophy cardiomyopathy.
These drugs are delivered via Sardocor’s intracoronary infusion methodology, which uses blood vessels to transport the therapies into the cardiac ventricular muscle cells during an outpatient procedure.
"With this business combination, Sardocor will be well positioned to potentially expediate its three clinical trials for our lead gene therapy candidates in HFrEF, HFpEF and DMD-CM,” Medera’s president, chief medical officer and co-founder Roger Hajjar, M.D., said in the release.
“By utilizing our intra-coronary methodology to directly deliver our gene therapy candidates into the heart, our approach has the potential to significantly lower the dosage compared other therapies that typically utilize systemic delivery,” Hajjar added. “We also plan to accelerate our timetable to apply for an IND and the start of the phase 1 trial for our next gene therapy candidate.”
The other part of Medera’s business is the screening platform Novoheart, which conducts preclinical disease modeling and drug discovery for Medera to help it fine-tune its therapeutic pipeline. Novoheart has an ongoing collaboration with AstraZeneca, which led to the world’s first bioengineered HFpEF miniature human heart models.
Medera’s merger is a rare example of a SPAC deal in biotech in 2024. After a number of high-profile announcements were made in late 2022, the reverse merger model once again dropped off in 2023, with a few exceptions, such as NKGen Biotech’s SPAC plan via Graf Acquisition Corp. IV.