With $32M, Boston Anti-Fungal Startup Morphs Into San Diego’s Cidara

Cidara Therapeutics logo (previously K2 Therapeutics)

Details about the new San Diego biotech headed by former Trius Therapeutics CEO Jeff Stein have been released today. I reported last week on the company’s regulatory filings.

The company, founded two years ago in Boston as K2 Therapeutics, has been rechristened as Cidara Therapeutics in a restructuring that includes $32 million in Series A financing to advance the company’s immunotherapy platform for people with life-threatening fungal infections.

While many fungal or yeast infections are superficial, studies have shown the incidence of potentially life-threatening systemic fungal infections has increased over the past 20 years, especially among patients with compromised immune systems. Cidara says more than 500,000 patients are treated for fungal infections in U.S. hospitals annually, and that the infections cause significant patient morbidity and mortality, with costs estimated at $8 billion.

Cidara says its “Cloudbreak” technology for “redirecting the immune system may offer major advances in developing treatments for these patients.”

Cidara also is advancing its work on biafungin, a new antifungal drug currently in preclinical studies.

Biafungin is a member of a new class of antifungal drugs known as echinocandins that inhibit the synthesis of glucan, a structural molecule in the cell wall of fungi; the mechanism is similar to the way penicillin works against bacteria. Echinocandin antifungals offer an alternative treatment option for serious fungal infections, especially those caused by candida, a common yeast fungus.

Cidara says its financing round was led by 5AM Ventures, Aisling Capital, Frazier Healthcare, and InterWest Partners, as well as unnamed “institutional crossover investors.”

The company was co-founded by

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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.