Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Forma Therapeutics steps out with $25M in VC

By Marc Songini

Cambridge-based oncology treatment startup company Forma Therapeutics Inc. has announced that it raised $25 million to fund its expansion.

Forma also announced this week its formal debut as a global drug discovery company. Forma, founded in May 2007 by researchers from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, seeks to integrate transformative biology and chemistry to create new oncology treatments.  One of its major backers is the corporate venture capital unit of Swiss pharmaceutical mammoth Novartis AG. In March 2008, Forma raised $4 million in a Series A round of venture capital from Novartis and opened an office in Cambridge. The company also sponsors research operations in Connecticut, Singapore and Beijing.

Now, the company said it has received $25 million in initial equity and non-dilutive funding from both the Novartis Option Fund and other sources. In a statement, Forma explained that some of the key features of its technology include a versatile cell-based screening platform. It also is relying on structure-guided drug discovery (SGDD) to exploit proprietary computational and structural biology with an integrated chemistry platform.

Last October, Forma purchased the assets and intellectual property of SolMap Pharmaceuticals Inc. This was a biotech venture of Chelmsford-based Mercury Computer Systems Inc.

Forma’s co-founders from the Broad Institute include Stuart Schreiber, director of chemical biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; Todd Golub, director of the cancer program and an investigator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Michael Foley, director of the Broad’s chemical biology platform.