Just under a year after netting its first US approval for a cancer-fighting menin inhibitor, Kura Oncology is launching another firm to apply the same idea to diabetes.
Kura has created Caspian Therapeutics to develop small-molecule menin inhibitors for diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Formally launching today, Caspian has $50 million to get its drug candidates off the ground. Backers include the T1D Fund and Eli Lilly and Company, alongside a spate of firms that had previously invested in Kura. Kura owns about 50% of Caspian.
Kura CEO Troy Wilson calls menin the “Swiss army knife of targets.” It’s an epigenetic modifier that controls gene expression by modulating the methylation patterns on DNA. In certain forms of acute myeloid leukemia—the disease that Kura’s menin inhibitor Komzifti, or ziftomenib, was approved to treat last year—menin interacts inappropriately with KMT2A fusion proteins, driving the cancer. Komzifti stops menin and the fusion proteins from interacting.
In diabetes, Wilson says, menin represses proteins involved in controlling the cycle of β cells within the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas cells. So a menin inhibitor could selectively expand the mass of β cells in people with diabetes, increasing insulin production.
“People are trying to chisel away at diabetes, both type 1 and type 2, in lots of different ways,” Wilson says. “They’re doing cell therapy. They’re doing implants. They’re doing a whole bunch of approaches of autoimmunity, GLP-1s. There is no other therapeutic target that selectively regrows the pancreatic β islet cells. It just doesn’t exist. So this thing is kind of a unicorn.”
The teams at Kura and Caspian expect to begin a Phase 1 clinical trial of Caspian’s lead compound, the small-molecule menin inhibitor KO-7246, by the end of next year and have data from that study in 2028. Caspian will present more information about KO-7246’s chemical properties at the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, which will begin in Milan later this month.
For Wilson, Caspian is the ninth company he’s started. Its name, Caspian, refers to the Caspian Sea, into which the Kura River drains.
Caspian itself has only one full-time employee: Rob Spencer, who’s acting as president and chief operating officer. Caspian and Kura will functionally partner on a lot of the drug-development process. The start-up will also work with Lilly’s contract research organization Lilly ExploR&D. “There’s no point, right now, in building a lot of redundant capability,” Wilson says.
