NEW YORK – Rezo Therapeutics launched on Thursday with $78 million from a Series A funding round, led by SR One, a16z Bio + Health, and Norwest Venture Partners.
Other investors in the Series A round included SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Hawktail. The company will use the funds to advance its drug discovery platform and build its pipeline of drugs. The platform is based on technology developed by Rezo Cofounder and CEO Nevan Krogan at the University of California, San Francisco's Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI).
The platform, called Sequence to Systems to Drugs (SSD), creates maps of molecular networks underlying diseases by drawing on proteomics, genetics, structural biology, and chemical biology data. Using these maps, the SSD platform is able to explore disease-causing protein and genetic interactions and identify novel druggable targets.
Rezo will initially focus its drug discovery and development efforts on treatments for solid tumors guided by mutation and allele-specific biomarkers. The company aims to identify targets that can be developed into precision medicines or be used as biomarkers to stratify patients.
"Through sophisticated analysis of cellular and molecular interactions of disease, including the protein-protein, genetic and biochemical interactions that cause disease, Rezo is poised to fundamentally shift the way we understand disease biology and approach drug discovery," George Scangos, cofounder and chairman of the board at Rezo, said in a statement.