Coming off a $50 million series B financing round, radiopharmaceutical developer Ratio Therapeutics has expanded its partnership with Florida-based CDMO PharmaLogic.
With the agreement, Ratio hopes to accelerate the development and commercialization of its pipeline of products in the booming arena of radiotherapeutics. Ratio’s lead candidate is fibroblast activation protein-alpha (FAP)-targeted radiotherapy for soft tissue sarcoma, which is scheduled to reach the clinic by the end of the year.
“PharmaLogic puts so much into their infrastructure that we decided to not build just a single-center site as some companies have done in the marketplace,” Ratio CEO Jack Hoppin, Ph.D., said in an interview with Fierce Pharma. “We see them as a very scalable commercial solution.”
PharmaLogic not only manufactures radiopharmaceuticals, it has a distributing network of compounding pharmacies across the country that handle radioactive drugs. Broad reach is important in the distribution of radiopharmaceuticals, which have a short shelf life, ranging from minutes for some imaging agents to 10 days.
“You’re selling ice cream without a fridge,” Ratio chief scientific officer John Babich, Ph.D., added. “We can meet everyone from Maine to San Diego with our products through [PharmaLogic’s] network.”
Operating in an arena that's drawing enormous attention, the timing appears to be right for Babich and Hoppin and the company they co-founded in 2021.
Before coming together, both had success with firms they created individually. In 1997, Babich founded Molecular Insight and 16 years later sold it and its portfolio of radiopharmaceutical candidates to Progenics for $115 million. Meanwhile, in 2008, Hoppin founded InviCRO, a contract research organization providing imaging services and software for research and drug development. He sold the firm to Konica Minolta for $285 million in 2017.
They joined forces at Noria Therapeutics, a Cornell University spinout founded by Babich in 2017. Four years later, Bayer acquired Noria and its two investigative targeted alpha therapies for prostate cancer, which the German company views as eventual replacements for the earlier generation radioactive prostate cancer drug Xofigo.
Bayer was the first major company to invest heavily in a radiotherapy, spending $2.9 billion a decade ago for Norwegian biotech Algeta, which developed Xofigo.
Since coming out of stealth mode in June of 2022, Ratio has attracted $90 million in funding, including its $50 million Series B round in January. A notable participant in the round was Bristol Myers Squibb, which made waves in December with a $4.1 billion buyout of emerging radiotherapy specialist RayzeBio.
Ratio also has drawn a partnership with Merck & Co. to develop a targeted agent for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging applications in inflammation and cancer indications.
“In this class of drugs you always make an imaging agent before you make a therapeutic,” Hoppin said. “PET imaging is the gatekeeper for these drugs. You first image the drug or a surrogate and then treat with the radioisotope.”
Just as they have for antibody-drug conjugates, pharma giants are increasingly vying to get a piece of the action in radiotherapeutics. Novartis’ early interest in the arena paid off in 2023, as prostate cancer radiotherapy Pluvicto generated $980 million in sales in its first full year on the market.
“With Pluvicto and Novartis, now you’re in a big cancer showing big improvements in survival where nothing else works,” Babich said of the buzz surrounding radiopharmaceuticals. “I think it was a number of things, the big guy (Bayer) showing up, the trials being run as proper phase 3 medical oncology-worthy trials and then entering into a big cancer and not just a niche cancer and I think that tipped it over for everybody.”