CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - (Business Wire) FORMA Therapeutics today announced that it has closed on a Series B financing that raised a total of $25.5 million. The round was led by new investor Lilly Ventures, with participation from existing investors Novartis Option Fund and Bio*One Capital of Singapore. Current anti-infective drug discovery partner, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc., joined as a new equity investor through a conversion of a previously-issued note. In conjunction with the financing, Steve Hall, Ph.D., a Venture Partner at Lilly Ventures, will join FORMA’s board of directors. “With this new funding, FORMA will focus on advancing our internal target-based oncology programs and in parallel, we will continue to pursue non-dilutive collaborations to further build our integrated drug discovery platform,” said Steven Tregay, CEO of FORMA. “Our collaborations with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Novartis Institute of BioMedical Research, Inc., Novartis Option Fund, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, and the Experimental Therapeutics Centre of Singapore all validate the interest in, and promise of, our drug discovery technologies.”
“FORMA has positioned itself to tackle the most challenging targets in oncology drug discovery, and I look forward to working with such an energetic and talented team,” said Dr. Hall. “The company’s unified approach to drug discovery, via its integrated biology and chemistry platforms, allows FORMA to explore advances in the understanding of new and previously elusive drug targets, and to translate those discoveries into promising drug candidates for those targets.”
About FORMA’s Integrated Drug Discovery Platform
FORMA is uniquely positioned through its unprecedented combination of technological capabilities and oncology expertise to access such novel target space and to develop a new generation of breakthrough oncology drugs. Some of the key features of FORMA’s discovery capabilities include:
• Versatile cell-based screening platform which allows the screening of discrete targets in cells and quantitative genome/proteome-wide profiling and target identification.
• Accessing new chemical space through structure guided drug discovery (SGDD) approaches leveraging proprietary computational and structural biology combined with our integrated chemistry platform which incorporates Diversity Orientated Synthesis (DOS). DOS combines the high stereochemical and structural diversity found in natural products with traditional combinatorial chemistry techniques. This approach has been proven to work for challenging targets and will allow the rapid optimization of lead therapeutic candidates.
About FORMA
FORMA Therapeutics is integrating transformative chemistry and biology to unlock the best targets and pathways that genomic medicine has revealed. Capitalizing on the targets and pathways validated by the Cancer Genome Atlas Project and other related efforts, FORMA is developing a new generation of cancer therapies aimed at previously elusive drug targets. The Company is achieving this by applying its proprietary cell-based screening, structure-guided drug discovery and Diversity Oriented Synthesis (DOS) technologies, which FORMA also uses to discover novel compounds for its partners in indications beyond oncology. FORMA is a global company headquartered in Cambridge, MA with additional research operations in Connecticut, Singapore and Beijing. www.formatherapeutics.com.
FORMA Therapeutics
Steven Tregay, CEO, 617-679-1970
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Media Contact:
MacDougall Biomedical Communications
Douglas MacDougall or Kari Watson, 781-235-3060
