Crinetics Closes $63.5M Financing to Back Rare Hormone Disease Drug

Crinetics Phamaceuticals team 2017 (photo used with permission)

Crinetics Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego biotech focused on developing new drugs for endocrine disorders and endocrine-related cancers, said today it has raised $63.5 million in a Series B financing led by Perceptive Advisors, the New York biotech fund.

Two new investors, RA Capital and OrbiMed, joined the round, along with existing investors 5AM Ventures, Versant Ventures, and Vivo Capital. With the latest funding, CEO Scott Struthers, who founded Crinetics in 2008, said the company has raised over $100 million, including private investments and non-dilutive funding such as Small Business Innovation Research Grants.

In a statement Tuesday, Crinetics said it plans to use the proceeds to fund its continuing clinical development of CRN00808, its lead drug candidate for the potential treatment of acromegaly, a rare disorder caused by excess growth hormone production. Last fall, the company began a Phase 1 study testing the drug, a solution that is taken by mouth. A separate arm of the 83-patient study will test a capsule version.

The company, which now has about 30 employees, also plans to use proceeds of the funding to develop additional new therapeutics for endocrine disorders and endocrine related cancers, and for general corporate purposes. Crinetics has focused its technology on G protein-coupled receptors. In addition to acromegaly, caused by a benign tumor of the pituitary gland, the company has laid out programs to treat patients with such disorders as neuroendocrine tumors, hyperinsulinism, and Cushing’s disease.

“We believe Crinetics is poised to make a meaningful contribution to the treatment of rare endocrine disorders and today’s successful fundraising validates that promise and our strategy to date,” Struthers said.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.