Blend Therapeutics, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company discovering new classes of medicines to treat cancer, announced today that it has secured $21 million in new funding. The new financing includes additional equity investment from a new investor and all of Blend’s existing venture investors in an expansion of the Series B round, as well as debt financing from an institutional investment firm.
The proceeds of the financing will enable Blend to fully exploit its proprietary Pentarin™ platform, unveiled today, which creates novel, miniaturized biologic drug conjugates encapsulated in nanoparticles, representing a new class of cancer therapeutics. Including the $21 million announced today, Blend has obtained a total of $39.8 million in funding to date. Blend is backed by top-tier venture investors, including New Enterprise Associates, Flagship Ventures, NanoDimension and Eminent Venture Capital.
Blend also announced today that it has secured a technology license from a private biotechnology company for novel bi-podal biologic targeting ligands that is an exclusive license in the field of oncology. The in-licensing of this ligand technology is a strategic asset for Blend to develop a robust pipeline of Pentarins. Targeting ligands are one of the core components of Pentarins and Blend’s platform enables the conjugation of the targeting ligand to a therapeutic payload with a chemical linker to create miniaturized biologic drug conjugates (mBDCs), and encapsulates the mBDCs in proprietary nanoparticles to create Pentarins. Together, the components of the Pentarins have distinct yet synergistic anticancer capabilities: the nanoparticle enables high therapeutic concentration at the tumor site; the small size of mBDCs allows for effective penetration and distribution deep into the tumor tissue; the ligand’s targeting ability allows for specific binding to tumor cells; and the cell-killing payload is released inside the cancer cells.