Werewolf Therapeutics Inc.

• Werewolf Therapeutics Inc.
• Health-Care

HOWL

We are an innovative biopharmaceutical company pioneering the development of therapeutics engineered to stimulate the body’s immune system for the treatment of cancer. We are leveraging our proprietary PREDATOR platform to design conditionally activated molecules that stimulate both adaptive and innate immunity with the goal of addressing the limitations of conventional proinflammatory immune therapies. Our molecules, which we refer to as INDUKINE molecules, are intended to selectively target the tumor microenvironment, or TME.

Our most advanced product candidates, WTX-124 and WTX-330, are systemically delivered, conditionally activated Interleukin-2, or IL-2, and Interleukin-12, or IL-12, respectively, INDUKINE molecules for the treatment of solid tumors. We plan to submit an investigational new drug application, or IND, to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, for each of WTX-124 and WTX-330 in the first half of 2022, and thereafter initiate a Phase 1/1b clinical trial for each candidate in multiple tumor types as a single agent and in combination with an immune checkpoint inhibitor.

We are building our PREDATOR platform to generate a pipeline of innovative therapeutics that cover a diversity of immune stimulating mechanisms with the potential to address significant unmet medical need in cancer. Our PREDATOR platform consists of our protein engineering technologies and our know how, which we use to generate INDUKINE molecules with multiple functional domains rationally engineered into a single protein to achieve the desired pharmaceutical profile.

Each of our lead INDUKINE molecules consists of four components: a cytokine, an inactivation domain, a half-life extension domain and a proprietary protease-cleavable linker. Our INDUKINE molecules contain cytokines that mediate pro-inflammatory, anti-cancer mechanisms within the TME, with full potency and functionality observed in preclinical studies. The inactivation domain physically blocks the cytokine portion of the INDUKINE molecule in non-tumor tissue throughout the body, or the periphery, preventing it from binding to its receptor until it is cleaved and thereby activated in the TME. We engineer the half-life extension domain to overcome the short half-lives of cytokines in vivo, which typically range from a few minutes to a few hours. The half-life extension domain enables high systemic and tumor tissue exposure for the INDUKINE molecule prior to its cleavage in the tumor. After cleavage in the tumor, the half-life extension domain is removed and the cytokine is released to activate immune cells. We select the proprietary protease-cleavable linker to enable conditional activation of the cytokine portion of the INDUKINE molecule within tumor tissue. This selection is based on our extensive screening in preclinical studies to identify protease-cleavable linkers that are efficiently cleaved by a broad array of human tumor tissues with minimal cleavage in non-tumor tissues.

We have assembled an experienced management team, board of directors and scientific founders who bring extensive industry experience to our company. The members of our team have deep experience in discovering, developing and commercializing therapeutics with a particular focus on cancer and immunological disorders, having worked at companies such as Novartis, Schering-Plough, Merck, ImClone Systems (acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb), Tizona Therapeutics (acquired by Gilead Sciences), CoStim Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Novartis), Potenza Therapeutics (acquired by Astellas Pharma) and others. We are backed by leading investors in the life science and biotechnology industry, including MPM Capital, which was our founding investor, RA Capital, Deerfield Management Partners, Longwood Fund, Arkin Holdings, Taiho Ventures, HBM Partners, Soleus Capital, Sphera Healthcare, Adage Capital and CaaS Capital. 
 

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