Vividion Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that launched in 2017 around discoveries made in Scripps Research Institute labs, has raised $82 million in financing.
Nextech Invest, a Swiss investment firm that funds companies developing cancer therapeutics, led the Series B round of funding. As part of the investment, Nextech partner Jakob Loven gets a board seat.
The company’s technology is based on work from the labs of Benjamin Cravatt, Phil Baran, and Jin-Quan Yu in La Jolla, CA, where Scripps is based.
The company aims to discover and develop new drugs that can treat disease by modulating protein levels by using a system that the researchers built to test small molecules against a wide range of hard-to-drug proteins. Arch Venture Partners, Versant Ventures, and Cardinal Partners financed the startup’s debut. At the time of its launch, Vividion claimed it had already identified potential drugs for targets previously considered “undruggable.”
New investors BVF Partners, Casdin Capital, Mubadala Ventures, Trinitas Capital, Mirae Asset Capital, Altitude Life Science Ventures, and Alexandria Venture Investments also invested in the latest financing round. Earlier investors Arch, Versant, Cardinal, and Celgene (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CELG]]), the latter of which signed a $101 million upfront licensing and investment deal with Vividion in March of 2018, did too.
Vividion’s CEO, Diego Miralles, said in a prepared statement that the company now has more than $165 million in cash with which it plans to move its lead programs into the clinic and expand its early-stage pipeline. The company’s immediate focus is in oncology and immunology, Vividion said in the statement.
Read more here about Vividion’s approach to discovering and developing new drugs.
