Bay Area cancer therapeutics startup ORIC Pharmaceuticals just raised $53 million in a Series B round to advance its small molecule drugs targeted toward treatment resistant cancers into clinical trials.
Its interim CEO is Richard Heyman – a serial biopharma entrepreneur who has helped launch companies like Aragon Pharmaceuticals, Seragon Pharmaceuticals and Metacrine.
The company’s remaining fairly tight lipped about its platform technology. Here’s what it says about its approach to treatment-resistant cancers:
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ORIC’s drug discovery vision integrates the identification of new, molecularly defined pathways of resistance with clinic-based phenotypic validation. A rigorous understanding of the molecular and genetic adaptations by cancers to various targeted therapies underpins the novel treatments ORIC seeks to develop. This is possible because recent technological advances have allowed for the detailed analysis of the genetic landscape of patient tumor samples. Drawing upon the expertise of its scientific founders, ORIC has implemented approaches to identify novel mechanisms of resistance. These efforts will result both in the identification of novel targets for therapy as well as biomarkers to define the patient subsets for whom the therapy would be most efficacious. ORIC’s scientists have already prioritized several potential therapeutic targets and accomplished extensive optimization towards ultimately choosing development candidates for clinical testing in relapsed-refractory cancer patients.
Investors in this round include the Column Group, Topspin Partners, OrbiMed Advisors, EcoR1 Capital, Foresite Capital and Kravis Investment Partners.
The science for ORIC comes out of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, developed by oncology experts Charles Sawyers and Scott Lowe. Notably, Sawyers played a key role in discovering cancer drug Gleevec.
