Valo Health, LLC, the technology company built to transform the drug discovery and development process using human-centric data and artificial intelligence driven compute, today announced its acquisition of Courier Therapeutics. A biotechnology company founded in 2015 by Dr. Alexander Krupnick and colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis and Mercury Fund, Courier developed a protein therapeutics platform that has the potential to make cancer immunotherapy safer and more efficacious than treatments currently available or in development. The Courier technology has potential applicability beyond cancer therapeutics, to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. The transaction includes an upfront payment, milestones and other consideration.
“We are enthusiastic about Courier’s proprietary cell-targeting technology because we believe it positions Valo to create a new frontier in cancer-immunotherapies,” said David Berry, Valo CEO. “This acquisition provides Valo with a unique opportunity to expand our proprietary capabilities into protein therapeutics, thereby extending our modalities and our reach while enabling us to potentially pioneer precision immune modulation as a tool against important diseases such as cancer.”
Valo believes the acquired technology has the potential to dramatically advance the field of cancer-immunotherapy and immunotherapy more generally. The first application of its technology, OPL-0101 (previously known as CT-101), is a fusion protein agonist that specifically targets and stimulates both natural killer cells and CD8+ cytotoxic T cells. OPL-0101, currently in IND-enabling studies, has the potential to create powerful, directed immune-mediated activity against cancer cells by priming innate and adaptive immune systems to fight cancer while reducing systemic off-target effects and exhaustion. Valo believes that OPL-0101 is an immuno-oncology candidate with the potential for development in a range of indications including colon cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, renal cell carcinoma, and/or advanced melanoma with the further potential to pursue specific patient populations within each cancer.
“We are delighted that Valo recognizes the value of our immune targeting platform and our unique tumor-targeting candidate OPL-0101,” said Dr. John K. Westwick, CEO of Courier Therapeutics. I have full confidence that Valo’s unique capabilities and resources will bring Courier’s innovative therapies to patients as quickly as possible.”
In acquiring Courier and its technology, Valo will be expanding the reach of its proprietary Opal Computational Platform into protein therapeutics. Valo aims to use the Courier technology’s expanded capabilities to target cells that will elicit the correct biological response in select patients and therefore positively impact the treatment of diseases. The cell- targeting capabilities of the technology, while initially being applied to oncology in OPL-0101, has the potential to apply broadly across Valo’s prioritized three therapeutic areas of focus, namely cardiovascular-metabolic-renal, oncology, and neurodegenerative disease.
About Valo Health
Valo Health, LLC is a technology company built to transform the drug discovery and development process using human-centric data and artificial intelligence driven computation. As a digitally native company, Valo aims to fully integrate human-centric data across the entire drug development life cycle into a single unified architecture, thereby accelerating the discovery and development of life-changing drugs while simultaneously reducing costs, time, and failure rates. The company’s Opal Computational Platform™ is an integrated set of capabilities designed to transform data into valuable insights that may accelerate discoveries and enable Valo to advance a robust pipeline of programs across cardiovascular metabolic renal, oncology, and neurodegenerative disease. Founded by Flagship Pioneering and headquartered in Boston, MA, Valo also has offices in Lexington, MA, San Francisco, CA, Princeton, NJ, and Branford, CT. To learn more, visit www.valohealth.com.
