Venture report: Orbis, Curve leap into launches

Leap years come in cycles, so on this bissextile occasion, BioCentury’s weekly venture report will take a look at two new start-ups with cyclic compounds that launched this week: macrocycle company Orbis Medicines and “microcycle” play Curve Therapeutics.

Backed by Novo Holdings A/S and Forbion with a €26 million ($28.2 million) seed financing, Orbis Medicines A/S is aiming to develop oral macrocycle drugs against both familiar and novel targets, in some cases competing with well-known biologics. Using its nGen platform, which incorporates hit-finding libraries and tools for synthesizing massive numbers of compounds in parallel, Orbis hopes to discover candidates it calls “nCycles” that can reach intracellular or extracellular targets...