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news.Superluminal Medicines secured $120m in a Series A funding round to advance the development of its assets into clinical trials.
The company focuses on membrane receptors that facilitate cell signalling and responses critical to human physiology. Credit: Logan Moreno Gutierrez on Unsplash.
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RA Capital Management spearheaded the financing round with contributions from current investors namely Insight Partners, NVentures and Gaingels.
New participants in this funding round included Catalio Capital Management, Eli Lilly and Company, and Cooley.
In conjunction with the funding, Catalio MD Diamantis Xylas joined the board of directors of Superluminal Medicines.
The capital raised will advance Superluminal’s lead programme into clinical development and expand its portfolio of small molecule drug discovery initiatives, concentrating on valuable G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) targets, a large family of integral membrane proteins.
Superluminal’s platform generates candidate-ready compounds quickly by integrating human insight, generative biology, chemistry, machine learning, and big data infrastructure.
The company focuses on membrane receptors that facilitate cell signalling and responses critical to human physiology and represent major drug target categories, including GPCRs, ion channels, and transporters.
GPCRs are targets for approximately 35% of all approved drugs. However, 70% of the more than 800 GPCRs remain untapped, with only 138 having experimental active-state protein structures.
The company’spredictive design-test framework accurately models protein structures and designs highly selective compounds targeting specific structural changes for therapeutic benefits.
Furthermore, the company’s discovery engine features in silico pharmacokinetic and toxicology prediction capabilities.
In August 2023, Superluminal Medicines completed a $33m funding round led by RA Capital Management, with participation from Insight Partners and NVIDIA.
Superluminal Medicines CEO Cony D’Cruz said: “We are grateful to have the continued support of our renowned seed investors and prominent new investors as we rapidly progress our existing high-value programmes and expand our pipeline.
“We are advancing six small molecule programmes and continue to build a discovery platform to quickly and efficiently generate therapeutics for any membrane drug target.”
