Signet Therapeutics Announces ￥60M Angel Round of Financing

(VCBeat) Mar. 5, 2021 -- Signet Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing innovative targeted cancer drugs based on disease models, recently announced that it has received about 60 million yuan in an angel round of funding. The latest round was led by Tiantu Capital, with participation from Leaguer Venture Capital, XtalPi and Sky9 Capital. Signet Therapeutics plans to use the funds to expand the R&D team and advance the existing pipelines into the clinical stage, as well as to conduct lead compound screening of novel drug targets.

Signet Therapeutics was founded at the end of 2020 by the founding team from the Dana–Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC), which is one of the world's leading research hospitals integrating "basic and translational researches, clinical trials and cancer therapy", with about 1,100 clinical trials in development. 

Based on the characteristics of the genomics of cancer patients, Signet Therapeutics has established a unique disease model, has identified a strong target for diffuse gastric cancer for the first time in the world. At the same time, it reached in-depth strategic cooperation with XtalPi, an AI-driven pharmaceutical company, for more than half a year to advance the targeted drug with independent intellectual property rights to the PCC(pre-clinical candidate) stage. In addition, Signet Therapeutics has multiple pipelines in development at the same time.

The success in clinical trials of the targeted drug for diffuse gastric cancer developed by Signet Therapeutics will quickly fill the market gap and can be extended to targeted treatment of malignant cancers such as ovarian cancer, breast cancer, and pancreatic cancer. On this basis, an active combination of chemotherapy drugs and immunotherapy drugs may greatly improve the survival of patients. Zhang Haisheng, the founder of Signet Therapeutics, said that in the future, the company will apply the "from disease to disease" approach to the early screening of diseases and auxiliary diagnosis, and other clinical scenarios.

Founded in 2016, Tiantu Capital has managed three VC funds and one angel fund, with an AUM of more than 3 billion yuan. After four years of practice, it has formed a relatively mature investment decision system and invested in more than 60 projects in the early stage.

Leaguer Venture Capital is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Leaguer Group. Its venture capital business began in 1999 and is responsible for the S&T enterprise investment of Leaguer Group. It is one of the earliest incubators focusing on high-tech enterprises in China, with more than 2,500 portfolios.