Nexo Therapeutics, a Watertown, MA-based small molecule oncology company, raised $60M in Series A funding.
The round was led by Versant Ventures with participation from New Enterprise Associates and Cormorant Asset Management. In conjunction with the funding, Ali Behbahani, M.D., general partner at NEA, joined Nexo’s board.
The company intends to use the funds to expand the platform.
Led by Andrew Phillips, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, Nexo Therapeutics is a small molecule oncology company dedicated to the discovery and development of new drugs for cancer patients who currently lack meaningful therapies. Nexo combines covalent ligand discovery and chemical biology with expertise in cancer biology and medicinal chemistry to unlock a pipeline of novel cancer therapies directed against previously intractable targets.
The company’s chemistry engine, CODON (Covalent Discovery and Optimization), combines a proprietary library that leverages chemical diversity and innovative covalent chemistries with scalable biochemical and in-cell proteomics. This allows the company to identify promising hit compounds and conduct rapid optimization to produce compounds for in vivo studies.
Importantly, the engine uses covalent fragments against all ligandable amnio acids, thus expanding beyond conventional approaches that are constrained to cysteine and enabling discovery against targets that have been refractory to prior approaches.
Nexo’s chemical biology capability, INFINI-T (Informed Profile Before Initiation of Target), uses chimeric fusion proteins to address target biology and pharmacology questions. The function of these chimeric proteins can be controlled by small molecules in cellular and in vivo models to generate detailed information about the required depth, duration and selectivity of target inhibition. Importantly, the INFINI-T platform provides target product profiles for medicinal chemistry well in advance of lead optimization. This is expected to decrease the time and capital needed to bring drug candidates to the clinic.
The company also announced a multi-year strategic research collaboration with The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the details of which are described in a separate announcement.
Nexo is also led by
- Michael Kim, Ph.D., COO and Co-Founder
- Rhamy Zeid, Ph.D., VP, Head of Biology and Co-Founder
- John Athanosopoulos, VP, Head of Operations and Co-Founder
- Joe Patel, Ph.D., VP, Head of Discovery
