Syn­thekine nabs megaround in bid to edge out Mer­ck, Sanofi in IL-2 sprint

Nine months af­ter launch­ing out of Stan­ford with $82 mil­lion and a port­fo­lio of en­gi­neered cy­tokines, Syn­thekine has land­ed a $107.5 mil­lion Se­ries B from Deer­field Man­age­ment and oth­ers to push their two lead can­cer pro­grams in­to the clin­ic.

Like a smat­ter­ing of ri­vals, Syn­thekine is try­ing to reimag­ine one of the most no­to­ri­ous can­cer drugs in his­to­ry: IL-2, a syn­thet­ic ver­sion of an im­mune mes­sen­ger mol­e­cule that proved too po­tent for most pa­tients to tol­er­ate, even though it could be high­ly ef­fec­tive at amp­ing the im­mune sys­tem to at­tack tu­mors. The in­dus­try-wide hope is that new ap­proach­es to pro­tein en­gi­neer­ing, along with some cre­ative think­ing, could al­low de­vel­op­ers to dis­till the tu­mor-shrink­ing pow­er, with­out all the tox­i­c­i­ties.

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