Repare Therapeutics Inc., a Montreal, Canada and Cambridg, MA-based novel cancer company, raised US$68m in Series A funding.
The round was co-led by founding investor Versant Ventures and MPM Capital with participation from Fonds de solidarité FTQ, Celgene Switzerland, an affiliate of Celgene Corporation, and BDC Capital’s Healthcare Venture Fund.
The company intends to use the funds to advance its platform and pipeline of novel medicines that target genetically defined weaknesses of cancers.
Led by CEO Lloyd M. Segal, Repare is developing new, precision oncology drugs for patients that target specific vulnerabilities of tumor cells. Its approach integrates insights from several fields of cell biology including DNA repair and synthetic lethality. The company’s platform combines a proprietary, high-throughput, CRISPR-enabled gene editing target discovery method with high-resolution protein crystallography, computational biology and clinical informatics.
With this financing, Repare emerges from Versant’s Discovery Engines after an 18-month stealth period during which the company advanced its CRISPR-enabled synthetic lethality drug discovery platform, identified several oncology targets and moved multiple programs into preclinical development.
Repare’s first disclosed program targets DNA-directed DNA polymerase theta (PolQ), a central component of a pathway that repairs double-strand breaks in cancer cells.
Founders Daniel Durocher, Ph.D., Agnel Sfeir, Ph.D., and Frank Sicheri, Ph.D., and their respective institutions, played instrumental roles in the company’s formation and growth in partnership with Versant.
FinSMEs
22/06/2017