Odyssey Therapeutics’ team of seasoned drug developers is welcoming another impressive fundraising round, closing a $213 million series D after abandoning plans to go public this summer.
All of Odyssey’s existing investors pitched in for the new round, the biotech said in a Sept. 10 release, with new investors Affinity Asset Advisors, Dimension Capital, Jeito Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, TPG Life Sciences Innovations and Wedbush Healthcare Partners also joining in.
Boston-based Odyssey will use the haul to finance clinical proof-of-concept studies across several of the outfit’s internally developed autoimmune and inflammation programs, Gary Glick, Ph.D., Odyssey’s founder, president and CEO, told Fierce Biotech in an interview. The raise will also boost the company’s preclinical pipeline, he added, a key point of emphasis.
“It was very important to the company and important to the board that we simply didn't just turn into a clinical development organization,” Glick said. “We built an amazing discovery team here, and we wanted to make sure that we're able to allocate the right amount of capital to early programs, while still rapidly advancing the clinical pipeline.”
This discovery focus is important for achieving Glick’s goal of making Odyssey’s programs last longer than those of his earlier endeavors. Before embarking on Odyssey, Glick spun Lycera out of his University of Michigan lab, which then licensed its assets to Celgene; co-founded and led IFM Therapeutics, which he departed in 2019 after deals with Bristol Myers Squibb and Novartis; and co-founded and ran Scorpion Therapeutics, which was later acquired by Eli Lilly for $2.5 billion in January 2025.
“The idea here was to try and build a company that would last a bit longer than the others,” Glick said. “I'd love to be able to take various products into phase three, and if it makes sense to commercialize or co-commercialize, that would be wonderful.”
Odyssey’s lead asset is a RIPK2 inhibitor that is currently being tested in phase 2 trials for ulcerative colitis, both alone and in combination with Takeda’s Entyvio. Top-line monotherapy data are expected in the first half of 2026, Glick said, with data from the combination study to follow eight to nine months later.
Odyssey began its voyage in 2021 with OrbiMed as the company’s biggest backer. Carl Gordon, Ph.D., a managing partner at the venture capital firm, called Glick and offered to fund anything he wanted to do. The $218 million 2021 launch was followed by a $168 million series B in 2022 and a $101 million series C in 2023.
“We've now raised close to $700 million in under four years and we have a portfolio of medicines,” Glick said. And there was so much investor interest this round, he added, that the series D could have easily been double its already substantial $213 million total. But better to keep some cash out in the wild, he said, so the company can go collect that money when the need arises; Odyssey’s cash runway is now set to run out in mid-2028.
“In many ways, the next round is already funded,” Glick said. “We felt three years of runway is quite good.”