Halda Therapeutics, a startup developing new cancer-fighting technology, has raised $126 million in new funding to advance experimental drugs into human testing for prostate and breast cancers, the company said Monday.
The Series B round extension brings to $202 million the total Halda has raised in support of a drug technology it calls RIPTAC, which uses a dual-acting small molecule drug to spur an interaction between proteins that kills tumor cells. The RIPTAC technology builds on research that involves “gluing” proteins together inside tumor cells to tag the cells for destruction.
The earlier approach, called “protein degradation,” has been brought forward by startups such as Arvinas, Lycia Therapeutics and Kymera Therapeutics.
Halda’s RIPTAC technology, which was inspired by work done at the laboratory of serial biotech entrepreneur Craig Crews, holds together a cancer-specific protein to another protein essential to cell function. This in turn causes an interaction that halts the essential function and results in cell death.
The funding will help Halda advance the experimental prostate cancer drug, code-named HLD‑0915, into the clinic in the first half of 2025. The company presented data from experiments in mice in early 2023, followed up by publication of additional data in a scientific journal earlier this month.
Halda hopes to show that HLD-0915 can help people with metastatic prostate cancer who no longer respond to hormone therapy. In preclinical testing, it was used in models of prostate cancer that were resistant to use of the commonly used drug Xtandi.
“This financing will enable us to bring to patients our oral, selective, and widely applicable cancer cell-killing mechanism that is designed to overcome drug resistance, which is a major shortcoming of many current standard of care cancer treatments,” said Kat Kayser-Bricker, Halda’s chief scientific officer, in a statement.
New investors Deep Track Capital, Frazier Life Sciences, RA Capital Management, Vida Ventures, Boxer Capital and Taiho Ventures took part in the funding round. They were joined by existing investors Canaan Partners, Access Biotechnology, Elm Street Ventures, and Connecticut Innovations.
As part of the transaction, the company will add to its board of directors Rebecca Luse, of Deep Track Capital; Joe Cabral, of Frazier Life Sciences; Nandita Shangari of RA Capital Management and Arjun Goyal, of Vida Ventures.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the relationship between Halda and Craig Crews.
