Jean Cui, a former Pfizer chemist whose last company was sold to Bristol Myers Squibb for $4 billion, has raised $173 million from a coalition of top biotech investors for her new company, BlossomHill Therapeutics.
BlossomHill is preparing to start human clinical studies of potential medicines that could someday treat blood cancer and lung cancer. It announced Thursday that it has raised $100 million from firms including Colt Ventures, Cormorant Asset Management, and OrbiMed. Investors say that the money, which comes on top of a large previous round, is a testament to Cui and her strategy for making cancer medicines that are less prone to tumor cells developing resistance to them. Among her targets: a competitor to AstraZeneca’s Tagrisso, one of the best-selling cancer pills on the market.
Cui told STAT in an interview that she believes that existing medicines are too often built based on “mimicry” of the same molecular scaffolds. Designing new molecular mechanisms from scratch, in her view, can produce better efficacy. “If we want to make the breakthrough to the next level, we really need innovation there,” she said.
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