NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Venture capital firm Third Rock Ventures has launched a cancer therapeutics firm called Tango Therapeutics with a $55 million Series A investment.
Tango said in a statement that it will use DNA sequencing and CRISPR/Cas9-based target discovery to provide improved therapies through three mechanisms: mutations that, when combined with the loss of a tumor suppressor, create a synthetic lethality; targeting multiple oncogenic driver mutations; and immuno-oncology.
"Loss of tumor suppressor genes is a hallmark of cancer, but the genes, themselves, are not tractable targets for drug discovery," Barbara Weber, interim CEO of Tango and a venture partner at Third Rock, said in a statement. "The availability of comprehensive DNA sequencing, coupled with CRISPR-enabled target discovery, provides us with new paths to identify novel drug targets and combinations that take advantage of vulnerabilities created by loss of tumor suppressor gene function — something we have been unable to do effectively in the past."
Among Tango's founders are José Baselga, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's physician-in-chief; Alan Ashworth, president of the University of California, San Francisco's Comprehensive Cancer Center; and Timothy Lu, a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The firm will be headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In December, Third Rock also helped launch a precision medicine company called Goldfinch Bio with a similar $55 million Series A financing round.