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Small molecule veterans reunite at BlossomHill, boasting $173M in funding
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While newer modalities like precision medicines and immunotherapies seem to dominate recent oncology dealmaking, BlossomHill’s $100-million series B shows there’s still space for small molecules – particularly when they’re designed by veteran duo Jean Cui and Y. Peter Li.
“Despite recent progress in precision oncology, many of the new drugs being developed are modifications of existing medicines, and new generations of drugs developed along a similar chemotype lineage often inherit limitations of their predecessors,” Cui told FirstWord. “Our team builds new approaches from the ground up that aim to address not only the cancer driver but also the on-target and off-target resistance mechanisms that continue to drive cancer disease progression after treatment.”
BlossomHill, founded in 2020, is Cui and Li’s second rodeo together. They also co-founded Turning Point Therapeutics, which Bristol Myers Squibb acquired in June 2022 for $4 billion.
For this venture, the partners are drawing on their drug design expertise and using “human intelligence” to build an in-house pipeline of small molecules that “redefine the gold standard” of cancer and autoimmune disease treatments – another differentiating factor from other emerging biotechs that are applying machine learning and AI to drug development.
“Our team believes that the connection between understanding the biology behind the disease and the efficient design of a completely new chemotype that binds to the target is a creative endeavour that AI cannot achieve and likely may not be able to achieve in the near future,” Cui said.
Near-clinical candidates
Thursday’s round, which was led by Colt Ventures, brings the company’s total funding to $173 million. New and existing investors also participated, including Cormorant Asset Management, OrbiMed, Vivo Capital, Hercules BioVentures Partners LLC, Plaisance Capital Management LLC, H&D Asset Management.
The financing will enable BlossomHill to bring its two lead programmes to the clinic this year.
The first candidate is a mutant-selective OMNI-EGFR inhibitor in development for non-small-cell lung cancer, and the second is a novel CLK kinase inhibitorCLK kinase inhibitor that modulates aberrant alternative splicing to treat acute myeloid leukaemia.
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