Celsius Therapeutics, a US-based startup developing treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases, launched yesterday with $65m of series A financing from investors including GV, a subsidiary of internet technology conglomerate Alphabet.
Venture capital firm Third Rock Ventures led the round, which included managed care provider Heritage Provider Network and Alexandria Venture Investments, the VC arm of real estate investment trust Alexandria Real Estate Equities, as well as investment firm Casdin Capital.
Celsius plans to discover and develop medicines by focusing on the functions of single cells in disease and the genes that cause those cells to stop working correctly, meaning precision drug treatments could be applied to autoimmune diseases.
The approach, which incorporates single-cell genomic sequencing and computational algorithms, could potentially also be used to develop immuno-oncology treatments for cancer.
Celsius chairman Alexis Borisy, who is also a partner at Third Rock Ventures, said: “Each of us is made up of tens of trillions of cells. At the core of founding Celsius was the new ability to see something we could not see before.
“We can now see the dysfunction of key cells and their interactions within their neighborhood. Diseases that we have struggled to understand now can become crystal clear. With that clarity, we hope to create novel precision medicines.”
Third Rock-launched companies GV has previously backed include Editas Medicine, which went public in 2016, and Foundation Medicine, which floated in 2013 before being acquired by Roche two years later, as well as Magenta Therapeutics and Relay Therapeutics.