A startup aspiring to widen the pool of patients benefiting from precision oncology has raised $270 million from investors since its founding in early 2020.
The total includes $162 million from a Series B financing announced this week by the startup, Boston-based Scorpion Therapeutics co-founded by entrepreneurs with a strong track record in drug development. They include Gary D. Glick, whose previous startups have sold drug programs to the likes of Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck and Novartis.
In a phone interview, Glick said his goal with Scorpion is to take compounds from discovery through phase 3 clinical trials.
“That was something I was interested in doing for this part of my career,” said Glick, who is CEO of Scorpion. His co-founders include Dr. Keith Flaherty, director of clinical research at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and a pioneer of precision oncology.
“Keith’s interests are expanding precision oncology well beyond the targets and areas where it has been to date,” Glick said. The other co-founders are Dr. Liron Bar-Peled, an assistant medicine professor at Harvard Medical School, and Gaddy Getz, director of bioinformatics at the Mass General Cancer Center.
Scorpion boasts what it describes as a drug-hunting engine that combines platforms in translational medicine, chemical biology, medicinal chemistry and data science. The company’s goals are to develop therapeutic candidates that more precisely target tumor tissue and to tackle non-enzymatic targets considered undruggable. Scorpion also is focused on protein targets that it believes have the potential to transform cancer treatment.
But the company is not wedded to a particular type of therapy or target, Glick said, likening its approach to the wide-angle lens taken by established drug companies. “We’re not restricting ourselves,” he said.
The company expects to name its first drug candidate this year, with clinical trials to start in 2022.
Precision oncology is a competitive field with numerous entrants. But Scorpion has made impressive progress in a short time, said one investor, Aaron Davis, CEO of Boxer Capital of Tavistock Group. The San Diego-based investment firm co-led the Series B round alongside EcoR1 Capital LLC, Omega Funds and Vida Ventures.
“They’ve got top-notch people building out the platform,” Davis said in a phone interview. “They come from the right places and also from a leadership perspective and past experience.”
Glick founded his first company, Lycera, in 2006 while a chemistry professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Lycera went on to partner with Merck on three drug-development programs in deals valued at more than $600 million.
In 2015, Glick founded FirstWave Bio that focused on treatments for inflammatory bowel disease, and IFM Therapeutics, which set out to develop treatments for cancer and inflammatory diseases. IFM sold two cancer assets to Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2017 for more than $2.3 billion and sold a subsidiary to Novartis in 2019 for nearly $1.6 billion. The company partnered with Novartis on another development program in a deal valued at $840 million.
Other investors in Scorpion include Atlas Venture, Abingworth, Surveyor Capital Management, Invus, Wellington Management Co., Nextech, OrbiMed, Casdin Capital LLC, Woodline Partners LP, Logos Capital, Janus Henderson Investors and other undisclosed institutional investors.
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