Anticancer Bioscience (ACB), a Chengdu, China-based pioneers in synthetic lethal approaches to precision oncology, closed an additional financing round, raising CNY63m (approx. USD10m).
The round, which was raised by a small syndicate of undisclosed Chinese angel investors, was in addition to the previous seed financing of CNT68.75m (~USD11m).
The company intends to use the funds for further expansion of its proprietary screening libraries and discovery platforms, with the goal of progressing two of its programs towards IND enabling studies this year.
ACB is an international private company, commercializing discoveries emerging from China’s cancer research at the J. Michael Bishop Institute of Cancer Research. The company is using its screening libraries and discovery platforms in cancer biology to uncover novel mechanisms to induce cancer cell death, without harming healthy cells.
The company has five distinct synthetic lethality programs in drug development. These include:
- Oncogene enabled synthetic lethality (focused on MYC inhibition)
- Tumour suppressor synthetic lethalityPolyploid cell synthetic lethalityCentrosome amplification/delustering therapy
- Restoration of contact inhibition
Led by Founder, President, and CEO Dr. Dun Yang, ACB has invested in proprietary small molecule and natural product libraries, that comprise novel scaffolds of drug-like molecules and natural medicinal botanicals, with over 20,000 botanical samples already collected and curated. Its small molecule libraries are based on novel scaffolds upon which further diversity can be assembled. These general-utility new scaffold-drug fragment (GUNS-DF) libraries, are being expanded and evolved through iterative screening/optimization processes for multiple phenotypic screening projects.
Since its foundation in 2016, ACB has grown to almost 50 employees in Chengdu China, Hyderabad, India, San Francisco, USA, and St Andrews, UK.
FinSMEs
08/02/2021