Function Oncology launches with $28-million raise

Function Oncology launched on Wednesday with $28 million in Series A financing, led by a16z and Section 32, with participation from Casdin Capital and Alexandria Venture Investments. The precision medicine company says it is advancing its CRISPR-based personalised functional genomics platform to "transform the future of targeted cancer treatment."

"The next level of precision oncology will be to move beyond gene sequence, to gene function," said CEO Srinath Sampath, adding that the company's platform "allows, for the first time, efficient, scalable and individualised assessment of drug target vulnerabilities directly in patient tumour samples…It also allows us to identify the non-mutated 'hidden' drug targets to power the next wave of transformative drug development."

According to Function Oncology, the platform leverages CRISPR-based gene modulation directly in patient clinical samples, allowing for comprehensive personalised tumour profiling to uncover drug target "dependencies" that would otherwise not be fully identified by conventional genomic profiling. The company said these insights can then be used to produce tailored treatment strategies, adding that its platform could ultimately pave the way for new therapies against known or novel cancer drivers.

Validation in AML

Steve Kafka, managing partner at Section 32, said the platform "has potential for both diagnostic and therapeutic clinical applications," ranging from "accelerating target identification and validation, to producing unprecedented insights to enrol the right patients in clinical trials, to dramatically expanding the impact of existing drugs and surfacing novel cancer targets for drug development."

Separately on Wednesday, Function Oncology announced that it will present data at the upcoming American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting. It said the findings provide clinical validation of the CRISPR-based platform in patients with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML).

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