Octagon is developing targeted drugs for severe autoimmune diseases that spare healthy immune functioning.
Cambridge, MA, USA
One Liner
One Liner
Octagon is developing targeted drugs for severe autoimmune diseases that spare healthy immune functioning.
What Problem We are Solving
Problem
Current medicines for autoimmune diseases, including steroids and immunosuppressive drugs, indiscriminately suppress the immune system. This puts patients at risk of potentially deadly infection and most of these medicines cannot be used long-term. As result, patients with severe autoimmune disease are poorly controlled and go through periods of intense disease exacerbation (flare) per year. Clinicians have a limited set of medicines with which to treat these patients and most are repurposed from transplant medicine or oncology.
About Us
About Us
Octagon is developing targeted medicines that specifically inhibit disease-driving processes based on a novel disease pathway. The company has 3 assets in active development. These medicines have the potential to address severe autoimmune diseases including Lupus and Arthritis and rare diseases such as Pemphigus/Pemphigoid, Myasthenia, and Scleroderma. Octagon's most advanced drug candidate is a monoclonal antibody.
These new medicines are the result of a differentiated drug discovery platform that directly makes use of human clinical samples to identify disease-driving biological pathways. This platform has formed the basis for a multi-year funded partnership with Novo Nordisk, a top-ten multinational pharmaceutical company.
Venture Highlights
Highlights
Octagon has independently won 3 startup competitions sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. This includes Amgen and Pfizer. This resulted in $165,000 in support.
The company executed a multi-year partnership with Novo Nordisk focused on inflammatory disease. Novo produced a professional quality video promotion highlighting the relationship.
Octagon is proud to count industry veterans, professional investors, and venture capital funds among our Seed investors. We have built an organization with a strong corporate culture and very low attrition, most team members have been with the company for 4 years or more.
Business Model
Business Model
Octagon is focused on building a multi-asset biotech company with a powerful discovery platform. We will not independently commercialize our products, but will instead pursue licensing/M&A upon reaching early clinical validation. These deals can be very large in the autoimmune disease space, with significant upfront payments in the hundreds of millions and additional downstream milestone payments that can be even larger. Octagon is a build-to-buy company, with an attractive technology and team that would be value creating for larger organizations.
Competitive Advantage
Quote
Octagon's medicines target a new pathway that drives the pathological activation of immune cells that causes autoimmune disorders. This biology is present in several high-value autoimmune diseases. Blocking this pathway can restore immune homeostasis without inhibiting normal immune pathogen response, meaning that Octagon's medicines can be taken chronically to maintain long-term remission. This is a radically new way of thinking about treating autoimmune disease, enabled by new biological discoveries. The platform that led to the discovery of this pathway can be applied in other disease areas and has led to a partnership focused on fibrosis.
Revenue
Revenue To Date
$330K
MRR
N/A
Revenue YTD
$330K
Burn Rate
$100K
Users
Total Users
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Total Users (Past 30 Days)
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Daily Active Users
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Monthly Active Users
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Total Paying Users
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MoM Growth Users
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Customer Costs
CAC
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LTV
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Churn
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Margins
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Go-To Market Strategy
Business Strategy
Octagon is focused on our strengths in drug discovery and research and development. Our strategy is to exit to a larger company prior to the full approval of our medicines. Larger pharmaceutical companies have established sales channels and massive marketing budgets. Building equivalent capabilities would be incredibly expensive and redundant. We will not be undertaking go-to-market or commercialization work independently.
Current therapies for autoimmune disease are focused on killing immune cells. Roche/Genentech sells an approved market-leading product called Rituxan that causes the death of most B cells. This product was originally developed for lymphoma but recently received approval for a rare autoimmune disease. Caballeta Bio is developing an even more aggressive cell therapy for killing nearly all B cells. This medicine will be extremely expensive and presents risk to patients. This medicine is still in development. Sanofi acquired a Btk inhibitor program from Principia that targets B cells in a new way. This program is still in clinical development and has shown weak effectiveness. Unlike all of these approaches, Octagon's drugs will not kill immune cells, but will instead prevent the disease-driving activation of these cells based on the novel biology that Octagon has discovered.
We are open to meeting up to grab a coffee, or just to chat.
We would really enjoy your feedback and insight into our venture and would be happy to discuss anything that you are currently working on to see if we can be of service!
