A successful $55 million series D fundraising allowed Oric Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s CEO to lean upon on a truism that's often easily waved away in business fundamentals as he overhauled the company management.

"It's cliché to say that it's all about people, but it is. Cash is abundant but people talent isn't," CEO Jacob Chacko told BioWorld. "The whole senior management team is coming through personal networks. I've known this team for at least 20 years."

There is plenty of good science out there, he continued, but noted that in the biotech ecosystem it's best to have people who have seen business cycle extremes; he wanted that experience in the boardroom and in the lab.

With this financing, the San Francisco-based company has raised more than $175 million and has added new faces to the chief medical officer, chief science officer, chief business officer and senior vice president spots.

Chacko comes from Ignyta Inc., where he was CEO. While he was there the company grew from 20 employees to 125 employees when it was acquired in December 2017 by Roche Holding AG for $27 per share in an all-cash transaction, valued at about $1.7 billion. Ignyta focused on oncology therapies to treat patients with cancers harboring rare mutations. (See BioWorld, Dec. 27, 2017.)

Chacko has also been an investor at TPG Capital.

Oric has roughly 50 employees today, up from 35 when he took the job a year ago. Of those 50, Chacko said, 35 are "hardcore R&D" people, and he said he plans to eventually add more.

The new chief scientific officer is Lori Friedman, who spent 15 years at Genentech Inc. and ultimately headed translational oncology for Genentech Research and Early Development.

Pratik Multani is the new chief medical officer, the same role he held at Ignyta with Chacko. He was chief medical officer at Fate Therapeutics Inc., too, and started his career at Biogen Idec Inc., where he helped develop Zevalin (ibritumomab tiuxetan) and Rituxan (rituximab) for treating non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The new chief business officer is Matthew Panuwat, who was previously senior vice president of business development at Dublin-based Prothena Corp., which, little more than a year ago gained $100 million up front and a $50 million equity investment in a collaboration with Celgene Corp. (See BioWorld, March 22, 2018.)

Another Ignyta alum is Edna Chow Maneval, Oric's new senior vice president of clinical development. She held that title at the time of the Roche acquisition as she was clinical lead for entrectinib, a molecule targeting rare cancers of adults and pediatric patients. She was also at Aragon Inc. when it was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2013 and at Seragon Inc. when it was acquired by Genentech in 2014.

Targeting cancer resistance

Oric plans to use the money to usher its lead candidate, a small molecule linked to treatment resistance to multiple classes of cancer therapeutics in a variety of solid tumors, deeper into the clinic. ORIC-101 is a selective glucocorticoid receptor antagonist. Oric currently is recruiting for a phase Ib interventional trial, launched in May, to establish the recommended phase II dose, safety, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and preliminary antitumor activity of ORIC-101 in combination with other cancer therapies when administered to patients with advanced or metastatic solid tumors. The study begins with dose finding in combination with nab-paclitaxel. Additional dose-finding cohorts with other cancer therapies may be evaluated through protocol amendments. Patients will receive intermittent administration of ORIC-101 five days on and two days off for 21 days followed by continuous administration (daily for 21 days) in combination with nab-paclitaxel using a standard 3+3 dose-escalation design. The study's completion date is set for January 2022.

The pipeline at Oric, which is an acronym for "overcoming resistance in cancer," also includes an orally available small-molecule inhibitor of CD73, as well as other undisclosed programs targeting mechanisms of oncology therapeutic resistance.

Some heavyweight investors chipped into the series D, including Fidelity Management & Research Co., City Hill Ventures, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Kravis Investment Partners, Foresite Capital, Taiho Ventures, Healthcare Endowment, Casdin Capital, The Column Group, Topspin Partners, Orbimed and Ecor1 Capital. The round was led by Oric's new investors, Arrowmark Partners and Invus Opportunities.