California, USA-based oncology biotech startup Eigen Therapeutics announced its launch along with a seed funding round of USD 7 million. The round took place on December 8, 2022. Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital led the financing for the firm. Meanwhile, Builders VC, Kevin Mahaffey, Hawktail, Matthew De Silva, Varsha Rao, Bioverge, Alumni Ventures, and Mount Pleasant Ventures, joined in the funding.
Purpose of funding for Eigen Therapeutics
With the latest capital injection, Eigen Therapeutics intends to apply its novel high-throughput platform toward the development of priming therapies. Their initial programs focus on haematological malignancies. Furthermore, in the future, their platform will allow them to quickly spin up programs for other cancer indications, such as solid tumours.
What the founders have to say
Eigen Therapeutics, CEO and co-founder, Transon Nguyen said, “Targeted therapies, including antibody-drug conjugates and CAR T-cell therapies, are incredibly effective in some instances and have significantly moved cancer treatment forward. But they could be far more effective than they are today. There’s a lot of focus on developing better, smarter targeted therapies, but we noticed there hadn’t been much attention on the other side of the equation. So we asked: What if we also made cancer cells easier for targeted therapies to eliminate?”
Eigen CTO Kamran Ali further added, “Once cancer has been primed and highlighted, the targeted therapeutic can more easily find and attack the tumour cells and eliminate cancer. When priming therapies are paired with targeted therapies, cancer treatment can become far more effective.”
What the lead investor has to say
Josh Kopelman, the founding partner at First Round Capital, said, “Priming therapies have the potential to improve targeted therapies and, ultimately, the lives of cancer patients. However, it’s a widely unsearched field. Eigen’s team and the platform they’ve built are the perfect matches to systematically search this field and develop more priming therapies.”
About the company
In 2021, Transon Nguyen and Kamran Ali launched the company. It is a seed-stage biotech company on a mission to make therapies that make cancer easier to find and eliminate. Eigen is focused on the development of “priming” therapies. It seeks to help targeted therapies reach their full potential by addressing cancer heterogeneity, making cancer cells more vulnerable and/or making healthy cells more resilient to treatment.
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