NEW YORK – Precision oncology-focused Nested Therapeutics announced on Thursday that it has raised $90 million in a Series A financing round.
The funding round was led by the life sciences investing business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Other participating investors included Foresite Capital, Avidity Partners, Cowen Healthcare Investments, and Section 32. The firm has raised a total of $125 million since Versant Ventures founded the company last year.
The proceeds will help Nested advance its pipeline programs and develop its drug discovery platform aimed at identifying new driver mutations and binding pockets in cancer targets. The platform maps mutational clusters onto the structural proteome to help identify novel druggable pockets and cancer-driving mechanisms. It can also design drugs that target these newly identified pockets and mechanisms.
Nested, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has already begun developing a drug designed by its platform, a MAPK pathway-targeted drug called NEST-1. The firm is currently studying NEST-1 in preclinical research and expects to nominate a development candidate by Q1 2023. It also has three other undisclosed drugs in the discovery and preclinical stages.
"Our platform uses insights from an array of fields, including genomics, structural biology, computational biophysics, and artificial intelligence," Nested CSO Klaus Hoeflich said in a statement. "This opens doors to design novel small molecules for previously known targets with well-understood biology and to target what has been previously undruggable."