The backers of Syros Pharmaceuticals are sparing no expense. The Watertown, MA-based biotech has reeled in a $53 million Series B round, a huge sum for a company based on relatively new understanding of fundamental human biology: the way our genes are controlled by extremely complicated signals within our cells.
“Our investors and board said to us that a disruptive breakthrough comes around infrequently, so we should make sure we’re investing appropriately to maximize the value,” said Syros CEO Nancy Simonian (pictured), whose company has grown to 25 employees since its emergence from stealth last year. Stacked on top of last year’s $30 million Series A round, the new financing was led by an anonymous Boston public investment firm and includes Polaris Partners, Aisling Capital, and Redmile Group. Flagship Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, WuXi PharmaTech Corporate Venture Fund, and Alexandria Venture Investments all returned to participate, as well. Flagship and Arch were the founding venture firms.
The cash should be enough to propel Syros’s lead drug candidate into human clinical trials, but Simonian declined to sketch out a timeline. Asked why so much money is necessary to push a drug program forward, Simonian said Syros will also expand “the platform and the product engine into multiple therapeutic areas.”
It’s rare for a cutting-edge startup to have such a long financial leash; for many biotechs with promising technology, once a lead program is identified, other programs are put on the back burner.
So what exactly is Syros up to? In a word, epigenetics—although it prefers not to use that term. (Syros prefers “gene control.”) Broadly speaking, the firm is developing drugs that make their way into the cell nucleus—a tumor cell, in the case of cancer—and disrupt the master switches that turn the cell’s genes on and off, especially the genes that are central to the cell’s state.
Syros’s work is made possible by new sequencing technology called ChIP-Seq, developed in part by Richard Young of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, MA. Young is a co-founder of the company. The other two scientific co-founders are Nathaniel Gray of Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Jay Bradner of Harvard Medical School, Dana-Farber, and the Broad Institute.
ChIP-Seq measures not just what genes are being turned on and off, but also the presence and activity of the molecular switches that are turning them on and off, and Syros is building maps of the complex, often tangled, circuitry. (Some of the switches turn on and off genes that create proteins that make other switches.)
Young and colleagues have dubbed the most important switches “super-enhancers” and estimate there are
