South Korea-based antibody developer Orum Therapeutics has raised $8m in a series A round that included Solidus Investment Company, a venture capital firm founded by CHA Medical Center Group.
Other investors in the round included venture capital firms InterVest, KB Investment and LB Investment. IYeo Jung Moon, investment division director at Intervest, will join Orum’s board of directors.
Orum is working on therapeutic antibodies for drug targets that are currently undruggable by current antibody or small-molecule therapeutics, and will use the money to help develop its cell-penetrating antibody technology to create novel therapeutics.
The company was selected for the South Korean state-backed Tech Incubator Program for Startups (TIPS) scheme in December 2016 after raising seed funding earlier in the year with angel investment from Kite Entrepreneurship Foundation.
TIPS provides R&D grants up to fivefold the amount of investments by pre-qualified angel investors.
Sung Joo Lee, co-founder and CEO of Orum Therapeutics, said: “The financing will support our first program in oncology targeting activated RAS protein, a highly-validated cancer drug target involved in aggressive cancers.
“Our technology has the capacity to create the first-in-class RAS-targeted therapeutic antibody for pancreatic, colon and non-small cell lung cancers with RAS mutations.”