Iambic Therapeutics Secures $50 Million in Oversubscribed Series B+ Financing to Advance AI-Discovered Oncology Pipeline Including Breast Cancer Candidates

Text | Liu Yumeng

In mid-June, Iambic Therapeutics announced the completion of an oversubscribed $50 million Series B financing round, led by new investors Mubadala Capital and Exor Ventures, with participation from the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) as well as existing shareholders Abingworth, Illumina Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Coatue, and Tao Capital Partners. This extended financing follows another oversubscribed Series B round in October 2023, bringing the total Series B funding to over $150 million. The proceeds will be used to further advance the development of the company’s AI-driven drug discovery platform.

Iambic Therapeutics (formerly Entos) was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in San Diego, California. With its unique AI-driven drug discovery platform, it supports innovative drug development. Iambic brings together numerous AI experts and experienced drug developers, including Frances H. Arnold, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on directed evolution. The Iambic platform can advance high-quality, differentiated treatments to clinical stages at a speed higher than the industry average, across multiple target classes and mechanisms of action.

Iambic Therapeutics utilizes its AI models for protein structure prediction and integrated drug design to discover and build a pipeline of candidate drugs. These technologies are integrated into a closed-loop, automated, high-throughput biological and chemical experimentation platform, which delivers new biological insights weekly from thousands of molecular designs, directly informing its AI models.

Iambic Therapeutics' AI-Driven Platform Aims to Solve Challenging Design Problems in Drug Discovery. The platform integrates Iambic’s latest artificial intelligence technologies and specialized tools, incorporating physical principles into its AI architecture. This enhances data efficiency and allows molecular modeling to extensively explore possible chemical structure space. The platform's algorithms can identify novel chemical mechanisms, uncover clear product profiles that optimize therapeutic windows, and explore chemical space to discover development candidates with highly differentiated properties. By closely coupling AI-generated molecular designs with automated experimental execution, Iambic shortens the design-make-test cycle—from new molecule design to new biological data—to within a week, potentially accelerating the drug discovery and development process significantly.

Since its Series A financing in 2021, Iambic Therapeutics has built an AI-driven drug discovery platform. The platform combines physical machine learning with experimental automation, demonstrating success in identifying therapeutic candidates with differentiated drug properties. Iambic currently has two clinical-stage candidates: IAM-H1 (later renamed IAM1363), a highly selective and brain-penetrant HER2 and its oncogenic mutant inhibitor; and IAM-C1, a potential first-in-class selective dual CDK2/4 inhibitor designed to expand the therapeutic window and address treatment resistance in solid tumors such as breast cancer. Additionally, Iambic has further solidified its leadership in the AI community by developing methods like NeuralPLexer and OrbNet to power its drug discovery platform.

IAM1363 is the first clinical candidate developed by Iambic through its NeuralPLexer drug discovery platform. It is a highly selective HER2 inhibitor currently undergoing Phase 1 clinical trials. This molecule is designed to overcome the limitations of previous HER2-targeted drugs, offering high selectivity, effective targeting of difficult-to-treat mutations, and demonstrating good safety. Iambic stated that in preclinical studies, IAM1363 showed over 1,000 times greater selectivity for HER2 than for EGFR, along with favorable pharmacokinetics and safety, preferential tumor enrichment, and central nervous system penetration. In HER2 tumor models, including intracranial tumor models, IAM1363 demonstrated strong efficacy and tolerability compared to benchmark tyrosine kinase inhibitors and HER2 antibody-drug conjugates. The drug’s development process was aided by an AI platform for identification and optimization, discovered in less than 9 months, and progressed from project initiation to IND submission in under 24 months—about one-third of the industry average timeline.

"I am thrilled to have such a strong group of investors join us in supporting the company, who share our belief in the tremendous potential of Iambic’s AI-driven technology platform to deliver highly differentiated medicines to the clinic," said Thomas Miller, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Iambic.

Iambic Therapeutics' series of AI-driven drug discovery platforms (including NeuralPLexer and ProPANE) have been developed through years of research collaboration with AI hardware and software provider NVIDIA. In October 2023, Iambic received financial support from NVIDIA and plans to leverage the NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing platform and NVIDIA BioNeMo cloud services to accelerate drug discovery. "AI-driven technologies, including methods co-developed by Iambic and NVIDIA researchers, are paving a new path for researchers to discover novel therapeutic candidates," said Rory Kelleher, Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA's accelerated computing and software are helping industry pioneers like Iambic drive technological breakthroughs, and our ongoing collaboration aims to accelerate innovation in drug discovery."

Editor: Hairuojing