NEW YORK – Alterome Therapeutics on Wednesday closed a $132 million Series B financing round and said it will use the funds to advance its lead candidates, an AKT1 E17K inhibitor and a KRAS selective inhibitor.
The funding round was led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives and included Canaan Partners, Invus, Driehaus Capital Management, Digitalis Ventures, and Blue Owl Capital, as well as existing investors Orbimed, Nextech Invest, Vida Ventures, Boxer Capital, and Colt Ventures. Concurrent with the financing, Josh Richardson, a managing director for life sciences investing at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and Uwe Schoenbeck, a partner at Canaan Partners, joined Alterome's board of directors.
Alterome CEO Eric Murphy said in a statement that the funding will allow the company to take multiple preclinical programs into the clinic in the next year. The firm's two lead agents are a covalent AKT1 E17K mutation-selective inhibitor, which is being studied in hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative, and triple-negative breast cancer; and a KRAS isoform-selective inhibitor designed to target 90 percent of KRAS mutations, which is under investigation in lung, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. Both candidates are in investigational new drug-enabling studies.
San Diego-based Alterome also has two programs targeting the MAPK pathway in earlier preclinical development. The firm's drug development efforts are informed by its computational chemistry platform, called Kraken, which it uses to explore molecular interactions and predict drug binding and activity.
After launching in 2022, Alterome raised $99 million in a two-part Series A funding round.