Bit­ter­root Bio nabs $145M Se­ries A with a plan to tack­le chal­leng­ing can­cer tar­get for heart med­i­cines

The founders of can­cer biotech Forty Sev­en had ini­tial­ly en­vi­sioned that the com­pa­ny would al­so work on de­vel­op­ing heart drugs that cut down in­flam­ma­tion. Be­fore it could re­al­ly get start­ed on that front, how­ev­er, the com­pa­ny was bought by Gilead for $4.9 bil­lion.

But Forty Sev­en’s founders, in­clud­ing Stan­ford pro­fes­sor of car­dio­vas­cu­lar med­i­cine Nick Leep­er and stem cell pi­o­neer Irv Weiss­man, kept work­ing on that sci­ence, pub­lish­ing an ar­ti­cle in the New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine in 2021 demon­strat­ing how Forty Sev­en’s lym­phoma drug can­di­date ma­grolimab al­so tamped down on blood ves­sel in­flam­ma­tion.

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