Delphia Therapeutics said Thursday that it raised $67 million to develop targeted cancer therapies that overactivate drivers of cancer, defying the norm established by decades of cancer drug development focused on inhibiting those signals.
The company was founded on science from Bill Sellers’ lab at the Broad Institute and is led by GV entrepreneur-in-residence Kevin Marks, as Endpoints News first reported in September. GV — Google’s venture arm — is leading the Series A round, with Nextech Invest, Polaris Innovation Fund and Alexandria Venture also investing.
GV’s offices and the Broad Institute are across the street from each other in Kendall Square, which is the heart of Boston and Cambridge’s biotech scene.
Bill Sellers“We invited Bill over to run an idea by him, which was built off of breadcrumbs from literature,” Marks said. “And he walked into the room and kind of leaned in and said, ‘Is this about activating oncogenes?’
“I just smiled and nodded,” Marks said.
While there have been research reports of how hyperactivating certain cancer-driving pathways could keep tumors from growing, researchers from the Sellers lab wanted to figure out how widely the concept could be applied. In a Nature Genetics paper published in September, they showed that across nearly 500 cell lines, overacting three major cancer-driving pathways could kill tumor cells.
Sellers was the head of oncology for Novartis’ research arm before returning to academia in 2016. Alongside Sellers and Marks, the company’s third co-founder is Mike Dillon, who was chief scientist at Ideaya Biosciences and is now chief technical officer at the neurodegenerative disease startup CuraSen.
David Schenkein“It is pretty rare to be able to talk about a brand new mechanism of cancer biology. I’ve been in this field for 40 years — coming up to 40 years since my fellowship — and we went through chemotherapy, then we went through targeted therapy, but this is a completely novel area,” said David Schenkein, who co-leads GV’s life sciences investment team and is the former CEO of Agios Pharmaceuticals.
Under Schenkein, Agios developed two commercial cancer drugs — both inhibitors — though the company sold the rights to the treatments and pivoted to rare disease two years after his departure.
Marks also worked at Agios for 12 years before leaving for Novartis.
Delphia hopes its activators can tackle a key problem that inhibitors face: resistance. Many cancers that initially shrink from targeted therapy eventually stop responding, and patients and their doctors are left searching for new options. But the company believes the cancers that are particularly resistant to inhibitors may be vulnerable to hyperactivators.
“We’re flipping the script — doing the exact opposite of the past 30 years. Absolutely, that’s bold and counterculture,” Marks said. “But it’s grounded in bedrock data.”