Lycia Therapeutics has grabbed a $70 million series B for its next-generation degradation approach to zero in on the untapped extracellular proteome that could target a host of diseases.
The South San Francisco biotech’s latest round was led by the Redmile Group, with help from founding investor Versant Ventures and new investors Cowen Healthcare Investments, Invus, RTW Investments, Eli Lilly and Alexandria Venture Investments.
Lycia will put that cash to good use, focusing on its lysosomal targeting chimeras, or LYTAC, platform a multiple-pronged approach to treatments and diseases, which can include both antibodies and small molecules, and has “the potential to inhibit many targets previously considered intractable across a spectrum of therapeutic areas and diseases,” the biotech said in a statement.
The company is looking broadly at applications for LYTACs, separating them into three main buckets: diseases where membrane or circulating proteins are hard to drug, diseases that are driven by protein aggregation and diseases in which autoantibodies play a role.
Lycia’s approach could be useful in cancers where patients develop resistance against treatments such as tyrosine kinase inhibitors, or it could help treat autoimmune diseases in which the body produces antibodies that attack its own tissues. It could even be used to make gene therapies accessible to more people.
It’s been a good summer for Lycia, which only a few weeks back saw Lilly tap its LYTAC platform for immunology and pain in a $35 million pact 9and $1.6 billion in promised biobucks). Its funding and that Lilly cash will be put toward its “internal undisclosed discovery pipeline of LYTAC degraders.”
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“We’ve made significant progress since our Series A last year advancing our LYTAC platform, building our team, and forging a key strategic partnership with Lilly to further expand the opportunity of our technology to address unmet patient needs,” said Aetna Wun Trombley, Ph.D., president and CEO of Lycia, and formerly of NASH biotech NGM Bio.
“We look forward to leveraging our recent $105 million capital influx to continue this momentum and advance our discovery pipeline of novel LYTAC degraders toward the clinic. We’re thrilled to welcome Redmile and our other new investors and are grateful for Versant’s continued support.”
Versant Ventures founded Lycia in 2019 (and uncloaked last year) within the firm’s San Diego-based Inception labs in collaboration with academic founder Carolyn Bertozzi, Ph.D., professor of chemistry and HHMI investigator at Stanford University.