Macrocycle start-ups emerge from stealth

Orbis Medicines emerged from stealth Feb. 29 with $28 million in seed funding. The company is the latest launched to turn cyclic peptide molecules into orally available drugs that could replace injected or intravenous ones. "Macrocycles in their own right are quite amazing molecules . . . that can bind to all the challenging targets," says Morten Døssing, who is board chair at Orbis and a partner at Novo Holdings, one of the investors in the start-up. Døssing says the ability to impart properties like oral availability and cell permeability has been missing from the peptide molecule field. So he and colleagues at Novo got "very, very excited" when they saw work by Christian Heinis and Sevan Habeshian, chemists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). Because the chemists had developed ways to build large libraries of macrocylic compounds at small volumes, the molecules can be quickly made,