
Chris Varma unveils MPM's latest startup — eyeing 'undruggable' cancer targets and powered by machine learning, $67M
Two years after MPM Capital enlisted Chris Varma on its busy oncology team, the former entrepreneur-in-residence is unveiling his first venture project out of his new stomping grounds in the Bay Area: Frontier Medicines.
For Varma, who’s also co-founded Blueprint Medicines and built companies at Third Rock and Flagship, this marks another opportunity to apply some cutting-edge science to “several of the most important and difficult targets in cancer” — targets that others have tried to tackle with more classical methods and failed. The launch round comes in at $67 million, which should go some way in scaffolding a preclinical pipeline and push one or more assets into the clinic three years from now, he tells me.
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