A mere 16 months following its initial funding round, a Cincinnati-based biotech startup has raised a Series A worth $15 million.
Kurome Therapeutics, a Cincinnati Children’s Hospital spinoff backed by local seed fund CincyTech, announced the eight-figure raise Thursday morning. It marks a quick ramp up for the company, which is developing novel therapies to help combat cancers like AML, or acute myeloid leukemia.
The round was co-led by Medicxi, a European-based life sciences investment firm, and Affinity Asset Advisors, a New York hedge fund focused in the biotech and health care space. CincyTech and other existing seed investors, including Queen City Angels, also participated.
Jan Rosenbaum, Kurome’s CEO and chief scientific officer, told me Kurome is considered a “fast follower.” Interest in the company spiked in December when one of its competitors released promising clinical trial results. Rosenbaum said her team was ready to field the calls that followed.
“It was more than just having the competitor out there and people getting excited and looking for anybody else working in the space. We have a top-notch technical team,” she said. “This is a team that’s looking at the market all the time – both from a scientific standpoint and a commercial standpoint. We had (preclinical) data to demonstrate why we thought we differentiated from the competition, and where we thought our points of differentiation would provide an advantage.”
Kurome will use the funds to expand its R&D program and de-risk its drug development process.
Specifically, the funding will support pre-clinical advancement of IRAK1, IRAK4 and panFLT3 inhibitors, to target cancer cells that evade or are resistant to cancer treatment. The biology being investigated was discovered by Dan Starczynowski at Cincinnati Children's Cancer and Blood Diseases Institute, in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Starczynowski is Kurome’s scientific founder.
The treatments are initially targeted for AML, a blood cancer that primarily affects adults 50 or older with a high mortality rate. But Kurome will look to expand its focus across a range of hematopoietic cancers, including pre-leukemic conditions such as myelodysplastic syndromes as well as certain solid tumors, the company said.
“Our first-to-market (indication) is AML, and we’ll be branching out from there,” Rosenbaum said. “It’s extremely exciting; AML is a disease where we lose so many patients, because they become resistant to all these other therapies.”
She said the company hopes to file for an investigational new drug application, or IND, with the Food and Drug Administration in 2023. The target is to start clinical trials shortly after.
With the news, Aaron Kantoff, venture partner at Medicxi, and Daniel Heller, general partner and chief investment officer at Affinity Asset Advisors, will join Kurome's board of directors, which is led by CincyTech managing director John Rice.
Kantoff said Medicxi is excited by Kurome’s early preclinical data.
“The Kurome team has generated compelling preclinical data that suggests a differentiated approach with potential advantages over others in this emerging space,” he said in a release.
Kurome, which was founded in November 2019, landed its initial seed round from CincyTech and others in February 2020. The company is headquartered in Hyde Park.
