With a new CEO and a phase 2 trial ready to go, Ocelot Bio has snagged $36 million in a series A financing led by RA Capital Management, Venrock and Vivo Capital.
The funding will go toward a phase 2 trial for Ocelot’s OCE-205, which is under development for hepatorenal syndrome with acute kidney injury, a complication of end-stage liver disease that affects 75,000 Americans annually and has a survival rate of only 50%.
With this series A announcement, Ocelot also revealed its new president and CEO, Katherine Vega Stultz, a pharma veteran coming from the COO role at Graphite Bio. She previously held leading roles at Celgene (now Bristol Myers Squibb) after starting out at Eli Lilly.
“I am thrilled to join Ocelot Bio at this critical time with the near-term initiation of OCE-205’s phase 2 study, representing the first therapeutic innovation in several decades for individuals with HRS-AKI,” Stultz said in a press release.
Stultz held the COO role at Graphite through the biotech's own series A in September 2020 and then an IPO less than a year later. That public offering landed at $238 million. But the company has had a bit of a rough go lately, with a 13% dip in shares after releasing some less-than-promising financial data in a fourth-quarter update. Stultz will take over from founding CEO Geoff Harris.
Ocelot’s funders for this round, which themselves are no strangers to the pharma industry, gave Stultz their stamp of approval.
“Katherine’s broad leadership background makes her an ideal choice to lead the Ocelot Bio team into this next, critical phase in OCE-205’s path toward commercialization," Camille Samuels, a partner at Venrock, said in a statement about the financing.
It may take time for Ocelot to reach the commercialization stage, but the company has already notched positive phase 1 data in healthy adults and a phase 2 is on the way for the peptide therapeutic OCE-205. The company expects to initiate a clinical trial for the treatment in the first half of this year after receiving the go-ahead from the FDA recently. No treatment for HRS-AKI has ever been FDA approved, and there hasn’t been much in the way of developments in the indication in recent years either, the company said.
The funding could also help Ocelot move OCE-205 into other indications including ascites, a condition in which fluid collects in the abdomen.
“The preclinical and clinical work completed to-date by the founding team demonstrates the significant promise for this compound as a potential best-in-class therapy for individuals with complications of end-stage liver disease," Stultz said in a statement.