KSQ Therapeutics, a Cambridge, MA-based drug development company, has just come out of stealth with a $76m equity financing.
The round was led by Flagship Pioneering with participation from Polaris Partners, ARCH Venture Partners, and Alexandria Equities.
Led by CEO David Meeker, MD, a biotechnology leader who was previously Chief Executive Officer and President of Sanofi Genzyme, and CSO Frank Stegmeier, an expert in industrialized functional genomics who led Oncology Target Discovery at Novartis, KSQ aims to advance drugs via its proprietary CRISPRomics™, which rapidly rules-out inferior options from the outset, thereby, focusing R&D investment on candidates with the greatest potential impact on disease.
Its CRISPR-based technologies industrialize a high-throughput, systematic way to elucidate the precise function that each human gene plays across a multitude of diseases.
Based on this approach, the company is advancing a pipeline of oncology and immunology drug development programs against novel therapeutic nodes to create a new set of disease-tailored medicines.
KSQ was founded in 2015 by:
– David Sabatini, MD, PhD, of the Whitehead Institute and MIT,
– William Hahn, MD, PhD, of the Broad Institute and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute,
– Jonathan Weissman, PhD, of UCSF,
– Tim Wang, PhD, of MIT, and
– founding investors Flagship Pioneering and Polaris Partners.
The company has a team of more than 40 employees.
FinSMEs
02/10/2017