General Proximity, a breakthrough biotech platform company, announced its emergence from stealth, unveiling its proprietary OmniTAC platform designed to pioneer the next generation of induced proximity medicines. The company has raised $16 million to accelerate the development of treatments targeting undruggable proteins associated with cancer, cardiometabolic disease, neurodegeneration, and longevity.
“We believe proximity medicines are the future of small-molecule drug discovery and have the potential to lower global disease burden more than any other current therapeutic modality,” said Armand B. Cognetta III, PhD, Founder and CEO of General Proximity. “Biological proximity—the nearness or interaction of two or more (macro)molecules—is a master regulator of biology. By achieving precise control of proximity through our OmniTAC platform, we are able to modulate ‘undruggable’ targets more effectively than other approaches. Control of proximity equals control of biology.”
The oversubscribed seed round was led by Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner at Felicis, a firm renowned for backing biotech trailblazers such as Recursion, Ginkgo Bioworks, and BioAge.
“It was clear from our first meeting with Armand that General Proximity is going to be one of the technologies that propels us towards cures for cancer and many other diseases,” said Senkut. “We quickly became convinced that their cutting-edge proximity approach would enable them to solve some of the most ambitious and consequential challenges in drug discovery, paving the way for a bold new era of human healthspan and longevity extension.”
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Other notable investors include Y Combinator, age1, Modi Ventures, Wilson Sonsini, as well as a number of prestigious angel investors including Jeff Dean (Head of Google AI), Uri Lopatin (Khosla, YC, Pardes), Ben Mann (Co-Author GPT-3, Co-Founder Anthropic), Alec Nielsen (CEO Asimov), Trevor Martin (CEO Mammoth), Juan Benet (Founder Filecoin), Nish Bhat (Co-Founder Color Health), Jim Dahl (Rock Creek Capital), and De Thompson V (Legends Capital).
General Proximity is the brainchild of Armand, a veteran of renowned chemical biologist Benjamin Cravatt’s research group. The founding team behind General Proximity includes an array of top scientists from institutions such as Scripps Research Institute, the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, UPenn, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and UCSF, with deep experience from top pharmaceutical companies (Novartis, Merck, GSK, Genentech, Roche, and Alnylam), as well as multiple veterans from the labs of induced proximity pioneers Craig Crews and Amit Choudhary.
General Proximity has assembled a world-class Scientific & Strategic Advisory Board featuring key opinion leaders from top biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies such as Martin Babler (Genentech, Principia, Alumis), Lawrence Hamann (Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novartis, Celgene, Takeda, Interdict), and Andy Crew (Astellas, Arvinas, Siduma) alongside a number of academic experts in cancer biology and neurodegeneration.
In total, the team is responsible for hundreds of peer reviewed articles and patents and has been a driving force behind over 200 clinical programs and 36 FDA approved medicines.
The team has also attracted significant interest from the pharmaceutical industry, securing a record five ‘Golden Ticket’ awards from major pharma pitch competitions (AbbVie, Servier, Astellas, Ono, Bristol-Myers Squibb) and winning a coveted spot in Johnson & Johnson’s JLabs biotech incubator.
SOURCE: PRNewswire