A new company is making its debut with a series A sum that’s sure to make hearts race. Launching with $300 million in hand, Kardigan plans to develop parallel treatments to prevent and cure cardiovascular diseases so that they’re no longer the leading cause of death worldwide, the company announced in a Jan. 10 release.
Investors include Perceptive Advisors, Arch Venture Partners and Sequoia Heritage. The company was founded by vets of MyoKardia, another cardio-focused venture that was acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb for a whopping $13 billion in 2020.
The new firm is led by co-founder, CEO and chair Tassos Gianakakos, who served as CEO of MyoKardia for seven years. Fellow MyoKardia veterans Jay Edelberg, M.D., Ph.D., and Bob McDowell, Ph.D., are also co-founders and serve as chief medical officer and chief scientific officer, respectively.
MyoKardia co-founder Leslie Leinwand, Ph.D., and cardiologist Beth McNally, M.D., Ph.D., are also Kardigan co-founders.
Kardigan will use the series A funds to knit together a pipeline focused on unmet needs in cardiology, including primary and secondary cardiomyopathies leading to heart failure, according to the release. The company plans to use its discovery platform—alongside in-licensing and acquisitions—to build its portfolio, which currently includes multiple late-stage candidates, according to its website.
Kardigan’s R&D platform uses a proprietary set of cardiac-specific tools to understand the mechanisms behind its therapeutic candidates as well as the individual responses patients have to treatments, the company said. This approach should allow for better matching of patients to treatments based on their unique characteristics, according to the biotech.
“While current standards of care play an important role, collectively, they fail to address the global health emergency in front of us,” Gianakakos said in the release. “Our cardiac intelligence model enables our teams to generate and share data across Kardigan’s programs, increasing our efficiency and probability of success in each of our late-stage programs that were carefully curated to advance our mission.”
Cardiovascular diseases kill around 17.9 million people globally each year, according to the World Health Organization, with more than four out of every five deaths caused by heart attacks and strokes.
Kardigan is based in South San Francisco and Princeton, New Jersey, according to the release.