A biotech startup using technology developed at Northwestern University raised a seed financing round this week led by Beta Lab, a deep-tech venture firm headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Flashpoint Therapeutics, a company developing therapeutics for cancer and other diseases, aims to continue to advance its research and development following its $10 million raise. Looking to pioneer nanotechnology-enabled medicines, Flashpoint immunotherapies have shown promise for treating breast cancer, lymphoma, cervical cancer and melanoma, among other forms of cancer.
The long-term vision of the company is to create a new paradigm for how drugs are developed.
"We're starting in cancer immunotherapy, but the long-term vision is to develop those programs and scale to something that can have a transformative impact in drug discovery," founder and CEO Adam Margolin told Chicago Inno.
Preclinical experiments have shown that Flashpoint's nanotechnology-enabled medicines can have transformative effects and improved efficacy. The startup's initial therapeutic candidate has been shown to yield 80 times stronger immune activation and 650% greater tumor killing.
Margolin, a Ph.D, has spent his whole career in cancer research after losing his mother to cancer when he was young. Formerly the senior associate dean of precision medicine at Mount Sinai, he made the move to biotech because he wanted the most direct way to get new innovations to patients.
"About a year ago, I looked across the country for what technologies I thought could have the biggest impact on that mission to cure cancer with new approaches and came across the work of our scientific co-founder Chad Merkin out of Northwestern who had developed technology over the last 10 years," he said.
Margolin said this technology was "far and away" the most advanced technology positioned to make a transformative impact.
