Blend Therapeutics Raises $16 Million to Fund Cancer Drug Development

Just a month shy of its first birthday, Blend Therapeutics of Watertown, MA, says it has secured $16 million in Series B financing. It plans to use the money in part to finance its development of cancer treatments based on a new generation of platinum-based drugs.

NanoDimension led the round with participation from existing investors Flagship Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

Blend is yet another company founded by Robert Langer of MIT and Omid Farokhzad of Harvard Medical School, along with Stephen Lippard of MIT. The company’s drug platform, first developed in Lippard’s lab, combines nanoparticles as the delivery vehicle with next-generation platinum drugs, meant to be safer than the platinum-based chemotherapies that are the most common cancer treatments today.

Blend CEO Mark Iwicki told me in an interview that the new financing, which comes on top of the $2.8 million raised when the company was founded last January, will be enough to fund the company through the next two years of drug development. Blend expects to file an investigational new drug application with the FDA in that timeframe.

Author: Catherine Arnst

Catherine Arnst is an award- winning writer and editor specializing in science and medicine. Catherine was Senior Writer for medicine at BusinessWeek for 13 years, where she wrote numerous cover stories and wrote extensively for the magazine’s website, including contributing to two blogs. She followed a broad range of issues affecting medicine and health and held primary responsibility for covering the battle in Washington over health care reform. Catherine has also written for the Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report and The Daily Beast, and was Director of Content Development for the health practice at Edelman Public Relations for two years. Prior to joining BusinessWeek she was the London-based European Science Correspondent for Reuters News Service. She won the 2004 Business Journalist of the Year award from London’s World Leadership Forum, and in 2003 was the first recipient of the ACE Reporter Award from the European School of Oncology for her five-year body of work on cancer. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University.