Dive Brief:
- Cancer biotechnology startup Treeline Biosciences has raised another $262 million to fund its oncology research, according to a regulatory filing made last week.
- The latest financing was led by private equity firm KKR, the company said Monday in an update posted to LinkedIn, and brings the total amount raised by the secretive startup to at least $473 million.
- Treeline is led by two biotech executives well known for their past cancer drug development work. Its CEO, Josh Bilenker, sold Loxo Oncology to Eli Lilly for $8 billion in 2019. Co-founder Jeffrey Engelman was previously the global head of oncology at the Novartis Institutes of BioMedical Research.
Dive Insight:
While its founders are high profile, Treeline Biosciences has been deliberate about what information it has told the public about its cancer drug work.
The company is focused on designing small molecule medicines against protein targets that are “validated but difficult to drug,” according to a 2021 message from Bilenker and Engelman. Its website notes plans to explore drugmaking techniques such as allostery and covalency to “expand the druggable universe.”
But so far, Bilenker and Engelman have kept hush about the details of Treeline’s research. In their Monday update, they said the company has made “significant progress” in developing its pipeline.
Regulatory filings show the company raised an initial $212 million in 2021, which was led by Arch Venture Partners, GV and OrbiMed. The funding announced Monday brings in an additional $262 million.
“[W]e are a team that wants our data to do the talking,” Bilenker and Engelman wrote in their update. “We are excited for the day when we provide scientific disclosure that has clear implications for patients with cancer and other serious diseases. That day is not today.”
With offices in Stamford, Conn., Watertown, Mass. and San Diego, Calif., the company now employs more than 130 people across biology, chemistry, protein sciences and computation teams.
The company’s website hints at further growth, with two dozen job openings for protein scientists, drug designers and computational chemists.
Bilenker and Engelman are no strangers to cancer drug development. Bilenker’s Loxo, founded in 2013, developed a handful of targeted treatments, two of which have since won approval. The company was one of several that helped push forward a shift in cancer drug development, aiming at tumors harboring certain genetic alterations regardless of where they are located in the body.
When Lilly acquired Loxo, it was interested in Retevmo, a drug for lung and thyroid cancers that won Food and Drug Administration approval months ahead of schedule in May 2020. The pharma has continued developing several other Loxo drugs including the kinase inhibitor pirtobrutinib, which has become one of its top cancer drug prospects.
Loxo also partnered with Bayer on another of its drugs, Vitrakvi, which it later licensed to the pharmaceutical giant.
Before Engelman joined Novartis, he spent nearly a decade at Massachusetts General Hospital researching molecular therapeutics and thoracic cancer.