Frontier launches with $67 million in funding

Abstract

Frontier Medicines, a biotech firm working on “undruggable” proteins associated with cancer, has emerged with $67 million in series A funding. The cash will help grow the R&D arm of the South San Francisco company to at least 20 employees by the end of 2019, cofounder and CEO Chris Varma says. The firm is looking for chemists, cell biologists, and computational scientists, among others, Varma says. Frontier’s technology is based mostly on the research of Daniel Nomura, a chemical biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies chemoproteomics—the chemical interrogation of proteins. Nomura works on proteins that have no obvious place for a small molecule to dock, making development of drugs a challenge. Instead, these hard-to-drug proteins, which Varma says are some 90% of the human proteome, form temporary pockets that could serve as binding sites. From Nomura’s work, Frontier has developed a database of these transient binding sites,