Human beings surely haven a lot in their bag, but we still don’t possess anything more valuable than that tendency of ours to grow on a consistent basis. This is because the stated tendency has already fetched us some huge milestones, with technology appearing as a major member of the group. The main reason why technology enjoys such an esteemed stature among people is down to its skill-set, which was unprecedented enough to usher us towards a reality that we couldn’t have imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we take up a slightly closer look, it should become clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired by the way we utilized those skills across a real-world environment. The latter component was, in fact, what gave the creation a spectrum-wide presence, including a timely appearance on our healthcare block. Technology’s foray into healthcare was so perfect with its timing, as it came right when the sector was beginning to struggle against its own obsolete structure. This reality, fortunately for us, went through a complete overhaul under the new regime, but even after achieving such an important feat, the emerging medtech concept will somehow keep on producing all the right goods. The same has turned more and more evident over the recent past, and truth be told, a new piece of funding will only make that trend bigger and better coming forward.
FogPharma, a biopharmaceutical company pioneering a new class of precision medicines, has successfully secured over $178 million in Series D financing. According to certain reports, the round saw close participation coming from the likes of ARCH Venture Partners, Milky Way Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Company, VenBio Partners, Deerfield Management, GV, Cormorant Asset Management, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Invus, Farallon Capital Management, HBM Healthcare Investments, Casdin Capital, and PagsGroup. Talk about how the company plans on using the newly-raised cash, it is expected to invest the money in accelerating the development of its growing pipeline of hyperstabilized α-helical (Helicon™) polypeptide therapeutics. Helicon therapeutics, as a concept, basically boils down to a class of drugs designed to overcome the limitations of today’s precision medicines, with its applicability ranging across various disease targets. To get a concrete example, we can look at FogPharma’s lead Helicon polypeptide development candidate, FOG-001, which is the first-and-only-in-class direct TCF-blocking β-catenin inhibitor that boasts meaningful utility for significant cancer patient populations. The utility bit is already, to an extent, validated during the preclinical research where the drug displayed a clear efficacy in stopping the tumor growth, even causing regression of the same over time. As a result, FogPharma will now submit an investigational new drug application and start its Phase 1 testing by mid-2023
Apart from it, the company is also advancing dedicated programs to treat a host of other elusive cancer targets, such as TEAD, NRAS, Pan-KRAS, ERG and Cyclin E1.
“FogPharma continues to make rapid progress on our moonshot mission to achieve universal druggability – a world where no targets are off-limits to medicine,” said Gregory Verdine, Ph.D., founder, chairman and chief executive officer of FogPharma. “We believe that Helicon polypeptides, a compelling new therapeutic modality, represent the future of precision medicine. We are thrilled by the support of our investors and will continue to build our platform capabilities, product pipeline which aims to address a significant percentage of cancer patient populations.”
