USA – Belharra Therapeutics, a San Mateo and San Diego, CA-based chemoproteomics company, raised $130M in funding.
The capital included $50m in Series A financing from founding investor Versant Ventures and a multi-year collaboration with Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, that will provide $80m in upfront capital. Led by Jeff Jonker, CEO, Belharra is a drug discovery company providing a platform that utilizes photoaffinity-based labeling to “trap” non-covalent protein-ligand interactions. Coupled with its chemoproteomics platform and informatics capabilities, the platform identifies probe-protein interactions on a global scale, revealing novel druggable pockets across a complete range of mechanisms, protein classes and cell types.The platform originated in the laboratories of Christopher G. Parker, Ph.D., John Teijaro, Ph.D., and Ben Cravatt, Ph.D., at Scripps Research. There, Drs. Parker and Cravatt developed a novel photoaffinity-based chemoproteomics technology to enable screening for small molecules that bind proteins in their native context and focused it on immunology targets leveraging the expertise of Dr. Teijaro. Stuart Schreiber of the Broad Institute joined as a co-founder to provide input on using the platform for innovative drug discovery and broad therapeutic application.The company, launched by Versant Ventures’ Inception Discovery Engine, is led by 04/01/2023
