Drug discovery startup Ten63 Therapeutics secures new financing

Fresh off a new funding round, Durham startup Ten63 Therapeutics is looking to advance its technology platform that uses artificial intelligence to unlock discoveries for difficult-to-treat cancers.

Ten63, spun out of Duke University in 2019, announced it had secured strategic investments led by the Chugai Venture Fund and the Gates Foundation. The investments bring the company’s total funding to more than $45 million.

“AI not only accelerates drug discovery; it enables us to pursue high-impact targets in ways that were previously impossible,” co-founder and CEO Marcel Frenkel, PhD, said in a news release. “Many of the most important targets across multiple diseases are considered undruggable. They require a new approach.”

Ten63’s approach is to use its AI-driven drug discovery platform, called BEYOND, to deliver quantum-mechanics level simulations to overcome challenges that have yet to be solved through conventional means of discovery.

For example, the Myc family of regulator genes has been identified as a driver of many types of cancer. Despite decades of research, breakthroughs in cancer associated with Myc have been difficult to attain. Ten63 says the mathematical advances in the BEYOND platform have helped yield potential Myc-targeting therapeutics that have surpassed other possibilities to date.

The funding will help Ten63 scale its platform as well as pursue a small-molecule pipeline focused on high-impact disease oncology targets.

“The enthusiasm and momentum behind this new funding validates what we’ve believed from the beginning,” said Clay Thorp, Ten63’s board chair and general partner at Durham-based Hatteras Venture Partners. “Ten63’s approach has the potential to transform not just cancer treatment, but the entire spectrum of drug discovery.”

Chugai Venture Fund, headquartered in Boston, is the corporate venture capital arm of Japan-based Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. The fund says its focus is on startups in drug discovery and high-potential technologies that enable discovery.

The fund was drawn to Ten63’s drug discovery platform and its ability to simulate trillions of potential new drugs quickly and accurately, John Gustofson, president of the fund, said in the Ten63 news release.

In addition to participating in the financing round, the Gates Foundation, founded by Bill Gates and his former wife, Melinda French Gates, has provided a grant to Ten63 for participating in a global strategy addressing cervical cancer.

Ten63 cited additional investors as participants in the round, including RYSE, K5 Global, SF Holdings, Duke Capital Partners, Durham-based Cape Fear BioCapital, Black Opal Ventures, and Panorama. They join the investors in the company’s $15.9 million Series A round from 2023: Hatteras, Yosemite, Morpheus Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, and Draper Associates.