Zentalis Pharmaceuticals Secures $85 Million Series C Financing to Advance Lead Clinical Candidates into Pivotal Trials

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) learned from foreign media reports that on December 9, 2019, U.S. biopharmaceutical company Zentalis Pharmaceuticals (“Zentalis”) announced the completion of an $85 million Series C financing round. The round was jointly invested by seven institutional investors and firms: Matrix Capital, Viking Global Investors, Redmile Group, Farallon Capital, Perceptive Advisors, Surveyor Capital, and Eventide Asset Management.

Since its establishment in December 2014, Zentalis has raised a total of $147 million from private financing.

This round of financing will be used to advance Zentalis’s lead clinical candidates into pivotal trials and expand the scope of its ongoing clinical programs. Zentalis is continuously developing its clinical-stage oncology pipeline to address the significant unmet medical needs of patients across various tumor types, striving to achieve potentially transformative clinical advances in the standard of care.

The company’s lead clinical product candidate, ZN-c5, is currently undergoing Phase 1/2 clinical trials. ZN-c5 is a potential first-in-class oral selective estrogen receptor degrader (SERD) for the treatment of estrogen receptor-positive, HER2-negative (ER+/HER2-) breast cancer, which accounts for approximately 70% of all breast cancer cases. In May 2018, Zentalis entered into a clinical development collaboration agreement with Pfizer to evaluate ZN-c5 in combination with Pfizer’s Ibrance® (palbociclib), a CDK4/6 inhibitor approved for the treatment of ER+/HER2- advanced breast cancer. The company has recently initiated a clinical trial evaluating the combination of ZN-c5 and Ibrance®.

Furthermore, Zentalis is developing ZN-c3, a next-generation DNA damage response (DDR) therapeutic candidate targeting WEE1 kinase in solid tumors, which is currently in Phase 1 clinical trials.

Dr. Anthony Sun, Chief Executive Officer of Zentalis Pharmaceuticals, stated, “Zentalis is delighted to partner with a distinguished healthcare investment group to deliver best-in-class chemotherapy solutions for cancer patients. Throughout my career, I have never witnessed a company advance so rapidly, securing three Investigational New Drug (IND) applications within its first five years since inception. I am proud of the exceptional achievements our team has accomplished. This financing serves as strong validation of our capabilities, personnel, and pipeline, enabling us to continuously execute our clinical and partnership strategies around our current product portfolio and accelerate the expansion of our team.”

Karan Takhar, Managing Director at Matrix Capital, stated, “We are attracted by Zentalis’s outstanding integrated discovery engine, broad therapeutic applicability, and market potential. Zentalis boasts a robust pipeline across various oncology indications. Compared with biologics or immunotherapies, small-molecule approaches offer significant advantages in cancer treatment, including ease of manufacturing for oral administration and the ability to target a wide range of potential intracellular targets. We believe that Zentalis’s candidate pipeline has tremendous potential to serve as optimal agents for monotherapy or combination therapy. The potential to target fundamental cancer pathways could address unmet medical needs in large patient populations.”

Matrix Capital is an investment management firm focused on public equity markets. It primarily consolidates private investment funds by concentrating on high-conviction investment opportunities within publicly listed companies. Co-founded by David Goel in 1999, Matrix Capital is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.

(Compiled by Wang Fang)