A Durham startup focused on developing therapeutics to treat "undruggable" cancer targets says it has raised $15.9 million.
The company, Ten63 Therapeutics, announced Tuesday it has closed an oversubscribed Series A round that will support the startup as it builds out its internal pipeline of potential therapeutics and expands its computational drug discovery platform.
Durham's Hatteras Venture Partners led the round, which included participation from Morpheus Ventures, SOSV, Draper Associates, Alexandria Venture Investments, the Sigma Group and other investors. Prior to this funding, the company had raised about $5.5 million in seed financing.
Ten63 is developing its own internal pipeline focused on therapeutics for cancer targets considered "undruggable." The company's lead program targets an oncogene — a cancer-driving protein — called Myc, which has been the subject of decades worth of research. CEO Marcel Frenkel said that the company believes it has the opportunity to develop the first Myc inhibitor.
Ten63 is also pursuing partnerships with other companies that could use it's drug discovery platform in other therapeutic areas or other areas of oncology. The idea, Frenkel said, is to reach the most amount of patients possible through this platform.
"We hope that using this platform we can bring in a new generation of therapeutics that will hugely benefit patients," Frenkel said.
Ten63 formed in late 2018, three years after Frenkel's mother died from pancreatic cancer. At the time, doctors sequenced his mother's tumor to identify what was driving her disease, but couldn't treat the cancer as many drivers of disease, especially in oncology, fall into the category of undruggable targets.
Frenkel, who previously worked at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, began thinking about ways to tackle this issue. He connected with Duke University Prof. Bruce Donald and Mark Hallen, Ten63's chief technology officer, to look at technology that uses a novel computational approach to pursue and crack undruggable disease targets.
The company, which operates out of BioLabs in Durham, has since built out a team with six full-time employees and other part-time employees and contractors. As it moves forward, Ten63 is actively hiring on both the laboratory side and the computational side of its business. The company could add another six employees to each side of the business this year, but ultimately, the science will dictate the hiring, Frenkel said.
The company is now well financed for the next few years, Frenkel said. In the short-term, Ten63 is focused on continuing to push its lead program and others in its pipeline toward the clinic, while also expanding on the company's drug discovery platform so that it can solve more targets with higher accuracies.
As for the company's long-term goals, it's all about the patients, Frenkel said.
"There's immense hope that if we can make a drug here, it can drastically benefit patients, including those with difficult to treat cancers, like my mother," he said.
