Repare in progress
Synthetic lethality play Repare emerges from stealth with $68M series A
With a $68 million series A co-led by Versant Ventures and MPM Capital, Repare Therapeutics Inc. emerged from 18 months of stealth today, making a splash in the growing pool of newcos targeting cancer via synthetic lethality. The company thinks its CRISPR screening platform will yield a deep, well-validated pipeline that could bring two lead compounds to the clinic in 2019.
Synthetic lethality occurs when deficiencies in different targets are separately tolerated, but trigger cell death when combined. That concept underlies the success of PARP inhibitors in ovarian cancer, and has spurred a rush to identify new targets that have synthetic lethal relationships with cancer-associated mutations, particularly in the DNA damage repair pathway. ...