C4 Therapeutics today announced that it has launched from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with the closing of a $73 million Series A round of financing along with a promising partnership with Roche.
The startup is working on selective protein degradation, specifically with synthetic chemical compounds it calls Degronimids. Essentially, C4 believes it has a way to kill disease-causing proteins that drugs cannot reach or that grow resistant to drugs. The Degronimids send the proteins straight to the ubiquitin-proteasome system in the body (basically a cellular garbage dump). Its initial focus is on cancer treatment, but the company plans to expand and address multiple diseases.
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“They basically put a sticky note on a new protein that says ‘Come and degrade me,’” Nathanael Gray, a principal investigator at Dana-Farber and a C4 co-founder said, according to STAT. “Many proteins that are considered undruggable … can be induced to be degraded by this approach.”
Another C4 co-founder Marc Cohen’s angel investment firm, Cobro Ventures, led the C4 financing. It was joined by Cormorant Asset Management, The Kraft Group, EG Capital Group, Roche, Novartis and other unnamed angel investors. The company did not say how much it received from Roche, as STAT reported, but said the deal could eventually be worth $750 million.
“We will see how it translates, but the excitement is literally palpable here,” Ken Anderson, a multiple myeloma expert at Dana-Farber and additional co-founder of C4 said, according to Forbes. “No one has successfully done this before. We’re quite excited this could lead to a whole class of novel medicines.”
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