There’s a new proteomics platform in town and it has rallied some serious coin.
Vividion Therapeutics launched on Thursday with $50 million in Series A financing led by ARCH Venture Partners and Versant Ventures, with support from founding investor Cardinal Partners.
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The startup incorporated in 2013. Since then, it has been operating in stealth mode, a status that was given away earlier this month when it filed a Form D with the SEC as part of its bid to raise just over $50 million.
Vividion’s technology has been spun out of the lab of Ben Cravatt, a professor of chemical physiology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Two other Scripp’s professors, Phil Baran and Jin-Quan Yu, were also part of the formative team.
“Ben is involved in what we call ‘chemical proteomics,’” explained Tom Woiwode, managing director of Versant Ventures.
In a phone interview, Woiwode said the platform allows scientists to observe proteins of interest in the context of the wider proteome.
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“He developed this amazing toolbox, a very comprehensive way of interrogating the function of proteins in their natural system, in whole cells, in tissues and in organisms,” Woiwode said.
As it stands, protein candidates are typically isolated and screened in biochemical assays. It’s artificial and there’s a risk that the results won’t translate into in vivo models.
In the associated news release, the company also explained that these target-specific assays are only applied to a narrow subset of the proteome — not the full range of proteins produced by an organism. The team believes there is much more that the proteome can offer.
“It opens up the scope of what we call the druggable proteome,” Woiwode said.
Vividion will be pursuing several therapeutic areas, but the core value lies in the broadly-applicable platform.
“What attracted me early on was the three-dimensional nature of what he can probe in living systems and then coupling that with next-generation chemistry,” said Kristina Burow, managing director of Arch Ventures. “It really allows you to break open entirely new chemical classes and to very quickly produce interesting molecules.”
For the investors, that justifies a $50 million Series A for an early-stage company working at the intersection of chemistry and biology.
“I think the number is appropriate to the opportunity,” Burow stated. “While this today is a platform, because of the way the biology of the platform is set up and because of the chemical starting point, I believe we’ll very quickly be able to accelerate into the clinic.”
Burow said the focus is on getting an ideal launching pad built for the company. The investors didn’t want to be “eye-dropping” dollars into the company, making funding an added hurdle.
The company will also have access to a wealth of experience. Tom Daniel, a former president of global research and early development at Celgene, has taken on the chairman role. Daniel also helped catalyze the Series A, Burow and Woiwode said, though there were many longstanding connections between the key players.
“One of the best drug hunters I’ve ever known told me once that ‘biology serves chemistry, chemistry serves biology,’” Burow said. “With Vividion, you’ve got the perfect marriage of chemistry and biology really serving each other and creating a very nice feedback loop.”
Photo: Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library, Getty Images