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Published: Jun 09, 2021 By Mark Terry
Kojin Therapeutics
launched with a $60 million Series A to initially focus on oncology and cell state biology. The round was led by Polaris Partners, Newpath Partners, and Cathay Health, affiliated to Cathay Capital. Participants included Leaps by Bayer, AbbVie, Eventide Asset Management, Alexandria, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Binney Street Capital, and several family offices.
The approach came out of the
laboratoryof Stuart Schreiber, Harvard University professor and co-founder of the Broad Institute. Co-founders of Kojin include Benjamin Cravatt, Stephanie Dougan and Vasanthi Viswanathan. The company’s technology is ferroptosis-based drug discovery, which is to say, iron-dependent cell death. Kojin says that difficult-to-treat diseases, which includes drug-resistant cancers, involve diseased cells that are sensitive to ferroptosis.