Light Horse Therapeutics is off to the races, rounding up a $62 million series A and tacking on a Novartis partnership that could reach up to $1 billion in biobucks.
The San Diego-based biotech emerged today with backing from founding investor Versant Ventures plus support from Mubadala Capital, Bristol Myers Squibb, Taiho Ventures and AbbVie, according to a Jan. 9 release.
The new biotech plans to apply precision genome editing to small-molecule drug discovery with an initial focus on cancer targets.
The Versant-created company has also roped in Novartis, securing $25 million upfront in a multi-target deal with the Big Pharma, according to a separate Jan. 9 release. Under the deal, Light Horse will have the chance to make up to $1 billion in R&D and sales milestone payments, plus royalties.
“The Novartis collaboration presents an extraordinary opportunity to leverage our unbiased genetic screening platform and proprietary chemical libraries to address novel, high-value targets previously considered hard to drug,” Light Horse CEO Markus Renschler, M.D., who most recently served as CEO of Cyteir Therapeutics, said in the release. “We are excited to work with the Novartis team to potentially accelerate the development of innovative cancer treatments over the coming years.”
The biotech’s platform is designed to find new functional sites within targets that play critical roles in disease biology. The “function-first” approach is the opposite of conventional “screening-first” approaches, according to Light Horse.
Under the guidance of Chief Scientific Officer Laure Escoubet, Ph.D., the company is currently moving several oncology programs through preclinical testing.
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