NEW YORK – IDRx launched on Tuesday, having raised $122 million in Series A financing to develop a pipeline of personalized small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitors for non-PDGFR-driven gastrointestinal stromal tumors.
Andreessen Horowitz and Casdin Capital led the Series A financing. Nextech Invest, Forge Life Science Partners, and other undisclosed investors also contributed funds.
Plymouth, Massachusetts-based IDRx's pipeline comprises two compounds, IDRX-42 and IDRX-73, which it licensed from Merck KGaA and Blueprint Medicines, respectively. IDRX-42, which has orphan drug designation from the US Food and Drug Administration, is in a Phase I clinical trial for GIST, while IDRX-73 is in preclinical studies.
But IDRx's goal is to target oncogenic driver mutations and resistance mutations simultaneously with intelligently designed combination therapies. Borisy Labs incubated IDRx and launched it with Ben Auspitz as its founder and CEO to specifically address "the limitations of today's precision cancer medicines."
"IDRx's approach offers the opportunity to develop more effective cancer medicines for patients through intentionally built treatment combinations, and we are starting with gastrointestinal stromal tumor, where tumor biology is well known but, at the same time, there remains a high unmet medical need," Auspitz said in a statement.
The company's other founders are biotech entrepreneur and investor Alexis Borisy; George Demetri, senior VP for experimental therapeutics and director of the Sarcoma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Nicholas Lydon, co-winner of the Lasker award for research contributing to the development of Novartis' Gleevec (imatinib); and Robert Forrester, cofounder and chief experience officer at the drug firm EQRx.