Advancing Toward Migraine Freedom: Why We Invested in Vedana

Today, Vedana Therapeutics emerged from stealth with a $46 million Series A co-led by Canaan Partners and Westlake BioPartners, with participation from DAWN Biopharma (KKR) and Alexandria Venture Investments. The company is developing a new generation of preventive therapies for migraine — one of the most disabling and underserved conditions in medicine.

At Canaan, we have spent decades supporting visionary teams applying scientific innovation to areas of significant unmet need, including migraine. More than a decade ago, we backed Labrys Biologics, one of the early companies developing anti-CGRP therapies for migraine. Labrys was later acquired by Teva, and its lead asset ultimately became AJOVY® (fremanezumab), an important preventive treatment option for people living with migraine.

We had the privilege of investing in the first wave of novel biologics for migraine and seeing firsthand how deeper insights into disease biology can translate into meaningful advances for patients. They fundamentally expanded our understanding of migraine biology and opened the door to entirely new therapeutic possibilities. That history shapes how we see the opportunity today: we believe a new era of migraine innovation is beginning, and we are proud to invest in it.

More than one billion people worldwide live with migraine — over 39 million in the United States alone. It is the leading cause of disability among women ages 15 to 49, a neurological disorder that shapes how people work, parent, take care of themselves, and navigate their day-to-day lives.

For decades, patients had virtually no new improvements. Then the field broke through. Researchers identified CGRP, a small circulating protein inside and outside of the brain, as a central driver of migraine attacks. When administered to healthy volunteers, CGRP reliably triggers migraine-like symptoms. Antibody therapies that followed — Aimovig, Ajovy, Vyepti — transformed care for millions of patients by sequestering and reducing CGRP in the body, and reducing the severity and number of migraines per month. 

Despite these advances, roughly 2/3 of patients on CGRP therapies do not achieve adequate control of their disease. Those advances led scientists and physicians to question which other proteins or chemicals in the body cause migraines.

One neuropeptide that stands out as a potential inducer of migraine is PACAP. PACAP operates through distinct biological mechanisms from CGRP, which means it may reach patients who cannot be adequately served by existing therapies. Much like CGRP, when one doses the peptide in people, it causes symptoms that are similar to migraine, but interestingly, they are distinct from the symptoms caused by CGRP. 

Historical efforts to drug the receptors that PACAP binds to failed, raising questions about whether antibodies against PACAP would be effective in patients. Recent Phase 2a and 2b data from Lundbeck's anti-PACAP antibody bocunebart provided meaningful clinical validation that the pathway is real, can be drugged, and could benefit patients with chronic migraine. Historically, P2 success in chronic migraine is predictive of P3 success, which bodes well for this new drug class to make it to market. Much like anti-CGRPs, the first-generation anti-PACAPs look like they will help patients, but fully prevent all migraines on their own in all patients. Better medicines will once again be needed for many patients. Designing the right product and identifying the right migraine patients to treat with each product would require unique insights.

When we invest in a company, a new compound or biological finding is not sufficient to get us over the line. Drug discovery and development require rigorous, adaptive decision-making at every stage, and that requires experts who know the granular details and risks of what they are embarking upon. The clearest signal I look for in a founding team is not the pitch — it is whether the founders are genuinely driven by the problem and capable of executing at top speed immediately.

Vedana was not built by newcomers to migraine. It was built by many of the experts who defined the field.

Leon Garcia, co-founder and CSO, and the exceptional discovery team at Vedana helped discover both Vyepti and bocunebart at Alder, before it was acquired by Lundbeck for $2 billion. Marcelo Bigal and Steve James led Labrys, a Canaan-backed anti-CGRP company that was acquired by Teva for $825M in phase 2, resulting in the approval of AJOVY. They joined Vedana as directors or advisors. Marcelo later introduced Ernesto Aycardi, who helped lead AJOVY's registrational development program at Teva. Ernesto was so compelled by the vision and opportunity that he joined Vedana as CMO after leading Kyowa Kirin's Global Clinical Development organization. The Westlake team helped bring together additional perspectives from the Amgen migraine effort. It introduced Rob Lenz, who led global development during the creation of Aimovig and now serves as Executive Chair, and Desmond Padhi, who led translational development at Amgen, was also familiar with migraine programs. Anurag Agarwal, co-founder and CEO, had the foresight to see the promise of anti-PACAP treatments and to build this team of giants behind him. The company's advisors include many of the physicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists who helped establish today's standard of care in migraine.

Together, they represent one of the deepest concentrations of migraine expertise in biotechnology — not just scientific knowledge, but the clinical, regulatory, and operational knowledge that actually gets medicines to patients.

Vedana was built around an expert team thesis rather than a molecule thesis. Most early biotech decisions start with an asset: a compound, a platform, a target with existing data. Vedana started with the conviction that the right experts, assembled around an emerging biological opportunity, would find the best path forward and the right compounds to treat the condition, whether discovered in-house or licensed from other sources. They are humble about their pipeline’s origination because all they want is the best product for patients. Based on the data generated while Vedana was in stealth, it is clear they have achieved their goal.

When we looked at the history of migraine drug development — at how much translational knowledge lives inside the heads of the people who have run these programs — it became clear that the team itself was the asset. In a field where the scientific terrain is now well mapped, the edge goes to the team that knows how to navigate it.

When I think about what it means to invest at Canaan, we always come back to the same question: how will this medicine and company change the course of human health? We focus there because we know the financial returns always follow if the impact on patients is there.

Chronic migraines occur 15 or more days a month. People with chronic migraine are managing careers around attack patterns all the time. They miss their children's events, make decisions about what they can and cannot commit to because they do not know when their next bad day will come. This investment is for the women I know who call to have a friend pick up their kid from school because they cannot drive, the executive trying to cope with light-induced nausea before a board meeting, and the fear they hold in their heart of whether another migraine will ruin tomorrow. That is not a market gap. It is one of the largest causes of human suffering today. It is a silent pandemic. 

None of this would be in motion without the founding vision of Anurag Agarwal, who recognized the PACAP opportunity early on and assembled the team uniquely capable of pursuing it, and of Leon Garcia, who made the vision a reality. They have recruited leaders in migraine drug development who used to be competitors to create a team together, and that speaks for itself. 

We are proud to partner with Anurag, Leon, Ernesto, Rob, Desmond, Marcelo, Steve, Mira, Donnie, and the entire Vedana team as they bring the next wave of migraine medicines to market.

¹ American Migraine Foundation. Migraine Facts and Statistics. ² Steiner TJ et al. Journal of Headache and Pain. 2020;21(137).