Erasca, a San Diego-based company that is dedicated to advancing scientific approaches for erasing cancer, has closed a Series A extension bringing the total to $64 million. New investors in this round include ARCH Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Reneo Capital, and private/strategic investors.
With the proceeds of the financing, Erasca will potentially in-license new investigational compounds in development. And the company will also accelerate the build-out of Erasca’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform that will drive the discovery and development of a new generation of oncology drugs designed to treat and cure cancer.
“Because cancer is such a formidable foe, we are committed to leveraging all available tools to beat it, including supplementing our in-house efforts with both external innovation and in silico approaches like machine learning,” said Erasca’s executive chairman and co-founder Jonathan Lim, M.D.. “The support of world-class life science investors, as well as Silicon Valley-based investors with expertise in machine learning, will augment both our corporate development efforts and our rapid development of an AI platform we call OPRA™, which aims to transform how drugs are discovered and developed.”
Currently, Erasca has multiple discovery programs underway for undisclosed targets that are biological drivers of cancer. Erasca’s proprietary artificial intelligence drug discovery platform known as OPRA (Oncology Pattern Recognition Algorithm) leverages advanced computational tools such as machine learning to accelerate drug discovery by elucidating novel tumor biology and innovative strategies that shut down key cancer pathways both with single agent and combination approaches. OPRA is able to analyze large-scale data sets, generated in-house and by their collaborators, to provide insights that focus Erasca scientists on the most promising strategies to tackle essential oncogenes within the wide landscape of cancer biology.
OPRA’s data-to-medicine approach is flexible and scalable as it enables deployment across multiple programs in parallel. OPRA can be overlayed onto Erasca’s established drug discovery workflows — which drives both scientist- and AI-driven insights as part of the discovery process. This accelerates the development of therapies with maximal potency to achieve the aim of erasing cancer.
“I feel confident in Erasca’s potential to make a significant impact on patient outcomes with their corporate development capabilities, cutting-edge drug discovery platform, and highly capable team that Jonathan has assembled,” added ARCH Venture Partners managing director Kristina Burow. And Andreessen Horowitz general partner Jorge Conde pointed out that “the combination of Erasca’s seasoned team, powered by the application of the latest advances in artificial intelligence, will allow them to develop strategies to attack cancer at its core and dare to pursue the prospect of cures for patients.”
