SHANGHAI - Forma Therapeutics has closed a new financing venture round, which amounted to $25.5 million and was led by investors from Lilly Ventures, Novartis Option Fund and Bio*One Capital of Singapore.

The new funding will help Forma expand its research operations in Asia.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forma is a biopharmaceutical firm that focuses on new targets based on the genetic findings of the Cancer Genome Atlas Project, and currently has research operations in Connecticut, Singapore and Beijing.

Forma CEO Steven Tregay told PharmAsia News that with the new funding, over the next year the company could move into new facilities in Singapore to support its 35 researchers.

In March of this year, Forma and the Experimental Therapeutics Centre of Singapore entered into a collaboration agreement to leverage Forma's chemistry platform to discover novel compounds for further development by ETC. Forma and Experimental Therapeutics will advance early-stage science and translate those discoveries into practical clinical applications.

"Forma collaborates closely with ETC to leverage Forma's drug discovery capabilities, in particular our diversity oriented synthesis (DOS) platform," said Tregay. DOS is a chemistry synthesis approach that generates compounds for challenging drug targets.

"With this new funding, Forma will focus on advancing our internal target-based oncology programs and, in parallel, we will continue to pursue non-dilutive collaborations to further build our integrated drug discovery platform," Tregay added.

Forma recently announced Yigong Shi, professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and chair professor of the Department of Biological Sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing, joined the company's scientific advisory board earlier this year.

"Currently our efforts in Beijing are focused on collaborative research with Prof. Yigong Shi of Tsinghua University," said Tregay.

Shi's research is aimed at elucidating the molecular mechanisms involved in tumors, with a focus on key regulatory components in programmed cell death. His approaches include a variety of biochemical and biophysical methods, particularly x-ray crystallography.

With Professor Shi in the state-of-the-art facilities of Tsingua University in Beijing, Forma's large scale crystallography efforts advance the drug discovery pipeline through capabilities that rival those of much larger organizations.

Forma is positioned through a combination of technological capabilities and oncology expertise to access novel target space and to develop a new generation of breakthrough oncology drugs. A growing global presence allows the company to rapidly advance its product pipeline, and to realize the full potential of its drug discovery engine.

"Our long-term strategy in Asia and Singapore in particular is to indentify unique opportunities to collaborate with world class researchers within universities such as Nanyang Technical University and within star research organizations such as ETC and Genome Institute of Singapore," Tregay said.

- Ying Huang (pharmasia@elsevier.com)

Lilly, Novartis Help Forma Therapeutics Raise $25 Million To Expand R&D In Asia

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