December 17, 2014
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Editor
A former Amgen vice president who teamed up with a roster of local Bay Area venture capitalists to found Flexus Biosciences has now announced that the company has received two venture rounds totaling $38 million from a roster of investors that reads like a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley VCs.
Flexus said Wednesday that it had closed its Series B financing from blue-chip investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, The Column Group and Celgene. Under the terms of the deal, former founding Genentech scientist David Goeddel, managing partner at TCG, will join the Flexus board of directors, which already includes Chief Medical Officer at Amgen Beth Seidenberg, now a general partner at KPCB, and William Rieflin, CEO of NGM Biopharmaceuticals.
Flexus focuses on a form of T-cell therapy known as “Treg biology,” which is the study of regulatory T cell biology and its impact on cancer. So far, some studies have shown regulatory T cells as key mediators in the creation of an immunosuppressed microenvironment.
“We are excited to welcome Dave to our Board and delighted by the support of TCG,” said Seidenberg. “The company is now well positioned to advance its pipeline of immunotherapies and to select a clinical candidate from its IDO-1 inhibitor program in early 2015.”
Co-founded in 2013 by former Amgen Vice President of Therapeutic Discovery and San Francisco site leader Terry Rosen and CSO and SVP of drug discovery at ChemoCentryx Juan Jaen, Flexus has been making major inroads so far.
Goeddel also participated in the first round of Flexus funding, which closed at the end of July at over $25 million. Flexus was incubated by KPCB and is widely considered a darling of Bay Area biotech VCs as well as those “in the know” about Treg biology in an oncological context.
In addition, Alexander Rudensky, the chairman of the Immunology Program and director of the Ludwig Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, chairs the startup’s clinical and scientific advisory board. Rudensky is also a National Academy of Sciences member.
“Immune-targeted therapies are already impacting the lives of patients afflicted by a growing number of cancer types,” said Rudensky in a statement. “Modulation of tumor-infiltrating regulatory T cells represents a promising unexploited therapeutic approach, creating the opportunity to complement, and work in combination with, the growing list of immune checkpoint inhibitors and other non-immunological therapeutic modalities.”
