• KSQ raised $76 million in October of 2017
• The company has 14 candidates in pre-clinical development

KSQ Therapeutics announced today that the company has secured an $80 million Series C financing to advance oncology drug candidates generated from the company’s proprietary CRISPRomics™ drug discovery engine into clinical studies. With the financing, KSQ will advance its first drug program into the clinic within the next 18 months and up to three additional oncology drug programs into IND-enabling studies. The company’s first drug program is a modified adoptive T-cell immunotherapy which has shown efficacy in multiple animal models of PD-1 resistance.

In the past 12 months, utilizing its CRISPRomics platform, KSQ has initiated and advanced 12 drug discovery programs across three oncology drug categories: adoptive T-cell therapies, immuno-oncology, and targeted therapies. In addition, KSQ is continuing to expand CRISPRomics for use in other therapeutic areas, including immunology and rare diseases. The Series C financing includes new investors Baillie Gifford, Cowen Healthcare Investments, Invus, and Lilly Asia Ventures, as well as full participation from its founding investors Flagship Pioneering and Polaris Partners, as well as existing investors ARCH Venture Partners

“KSQ has made remarkable progress in the past 12 months taking an unbiased, whole-genome approach to target identification with the goal of changing the probabilities of drug discovery and development. This approach has rapidly generated a broad pipeline of cancer programs and positions us to create new medicines with higher success rates and better outcomes for patients,” said David Meeker, MD, Chief Executive Officer of KSQ. “The power of our platform is evident in our first drug program, a modified adoptive T-cell immunotherapy with strong activity in PD-1 resistant solid tumors.”

KSQ Therapeutics has built a genome-scale, functional-genomics drug discovery engine, called CRISPRomics, to pinpoint therapeutic nodes that directly correlate genomic function to disease with unprecedented certainty and speed. Using CRISPRomics, KSQ is elucidating the function that each human gene plays in a multitude of diseases providing a unique and more comprehensive understanding of disease biology. The quality of these insights enables KSQ to identify a multitude of high-confidence, patient-tailored, targets for drug development and rapidly rule-out thousands of less relevant targets from the outset; thereby, focusing R&D investment on the development of medicines with the greatest potential to meaningfully impact the treatment of human disease.

KSQ currently has fourteen drugs in pre-clinical development. In October of 2017, the company announced it had secured $76 million in financing.