Diagonal Therapeutics is taking shape, launching with $128 million and backed by the likes of BVF Partners, Atlas Venture and RA Capital to develop a pipeline of antibody agonists.
The company will use this significant financial firepower to accelerate development of its pipeline of four assets. Two of these candidates are more advanced, including a lead asset targeting the inherited bleeding disorder hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT) and a runner-up designed to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH).
Unlike conventional antibody development, Diagonal is working on candidates that activate broken signaling pathways rather than inhibit them. The HHT asset, for example, reignites a receptor in the TGF-β superfamily, with preclinical models showing that the agonist antibodies “prevent and reverse the formation of pathological vascular malformations,” the company said in a release.
The $128 million will pay for at least a proof-of-concept study for the HHT program, the company noted in its announcement, though a full cash runway was not specified.
Diagonal is led by CEO Alex Lugovskoy, Ph.D., an entrepreneur-in-residence at Atlas who’s had previous C-suite stints at Dragonfly Therapeutics and Morphic Therapeutic. Diagonal’s platform is the byproduct of computational and scientific advancements made in the last five to 10 years, Lugovskoy told Fierce Biotech.
“I think more and more people will start using those types of approaches to all kinds of antibody engineering techniques, which is a blend of experimental and computational,” the CEO said in an interview.
Diagonal’s stated PAH ambitions come days after Merck & Co.’s much-hyped Winrevair (sotatercept) received FDA approval for the condition, resetting the competitive landscape. Lugovskoy conceded that unlike HHT, which lacks treatment options, Winrevair is a “significant advance” for PAH patients. But he said that because the drug acts as an activin receptor ligand trap rather than a fix for genetic mutations, the worst case scenario for Diagonal is that its own candidate—if approved—is synergistic on the marketplace.
“I do not see us directly competing with sotatercept because what we are doing is promoting missing signaling, whereas [Merck is] inhibiting excessive activin signaling,” Lugovskoy said.
Diagonal has a good sense of Winrevair’s capabilities, with Acceleron’s former vice president of biology, Patrick Andre, Ph.D., now Diagonal’s chief scientific officer. Merck got hold of Winrevair when it acquired Acceleron for $11.5 billion in 2021.
Equipped with new cash, Lugovskoy expects Diagonal will grow its head count in the single digits, with most of the new jobs centered on building clinical capabilities.