NEW YORK – Totus Medicines unveiled its PI3Ka-targeted drug program and announced having raised $40 million in a Series A financing on Thursday.
The company will use the financing, led by DCVC Bio and Northpond Ventures, to grow its proprietary drug discovery platform and to push TOS-358, its lead PI3Ka targeting compound, toward the clinic.
TOS-358 showed strong preclinical efficiency in inducing tumor regression in a variety of cancers, including of the breast, colon, lung, and stomach, in patient-derived mouse xenograft models, Totus said in a statement. Totus added that PI3Ka is the most commonly mutated oncogene and drives a significant percentage of breast, colon, lung, bladder, stomach, and other cancers.
The company aims to begin clinical trials of TOS-358 in the second half of 2022.
Totus' drug discovery platform combines machine learning with proprietary molecular tags that track drug binding in individual cells to simultaneously screen billions of small molecules across thousands of genes. Totus plans to screen up to 2 billion compounds across the human genome within the coming two years, with the goal of "making the entire human genome druggable."
"We are drugging undruggable targets at scale, moving us closer to a world where every physician and every patient can look forward to effective treatments for the most devastating illnesses," Neil Dhawan, cofounder and CEO of Totus Medicines, said in a statement. "The TOS-358 drug program is a crowning achievement in that mission, and we look forward to advancing the program — and many others — into the clinic."
The Series A financing was also supported by Camford Capital, with original seed funding from Social Impact Capital.