Josh Bilenker, Jeff En­gel­man qui­et on every­thing be­hind their $735M 'outer edge' start­up

An $8 bil­lion ex­it from Eli Lil­ly and a short-lived stint head­ing up on­col­o­gy work at the Big Phar­ma post-Loxo sale have per­suad­ed Josh Bilenker to be hush-hush about his new ven­ture, which ever-so-slight­ly broke cov­er last year and re­mains al­most 100% un­der wraps, save for in­vestor names.

Bilenker, who was a life sci­ences VC in­vestor pri­or to Loxo and be­fore that, a med­ical of­fi­cer at the FDA, is work­ing on a 130-em­ploy­ee start­up with co-founder Jef­frey En­gel­man, the for­mer head of on­col­o­gy at No­var­tis In­sti­tutes for Bio­Med­ical Re­search. The CEO and CSO duo put out word Mon­day morn­ing that KKR led an ex­pan­sion to its ex­ist­ing pool of back­ers for Tree­line Bio­sciences, which they claim is fo­cused on the “out­er edge of sci­en­tif­ic pos­si­bil­i­ty.”

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