Investing in Kimia Therapeutics
Some say that drug development is a numbers game. This saying flows from the vastness of chemical space—the universe of drug-like molecules (~1060 possibilities) companies must sift through to find their lead compound. We think drug development is a numbers game for a different reason. It’s exceptionally rare to meet a truly singular team in biotech—one that combines vision, passion, unique technology, and proven success. With Stig Hansen and the entire team at Kimia Therapeutics, we believe we’ve found our needle in a haystack.
As the founder and previous CEO of Carmot Therapeutics for over a decade, Stig and team successfully navigated the travails of drug development from discovery, to clinical development, to approval, and ultimately to commercialization. Lumakras, the world’s first FDA-approved KRAS G12C inhibitor for use in metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), was developed using Carmot’s chemotype evolution platform. Based on the merits of its pipeline and platform, Carmot Therapeutics was recently acquired by Roche for $3.1 billion.
Nowadays, generative chemistry is flourishing exponentially. Adapted from natural language and computer vision, generative machine learning (ML) algorithms (e.g., diffusion models) for small molecule drug discovery are proliferating. Though they have enormous potential, generative chemistry models lack sufficient training data. We saw an opportunity to satisfy this data demand by integrating Carmot’s proven chemotype evolution platform with high-throughput lab automation, digital infrastructure, and cutting-edge ML models in an active learning loop. That opportunity is Kimia Therapeutics.
Stig and his team are seasoned drug hunters, medicinal chemists, biologists, automation engineers, and ML scientists. Despite their past successes, they’re united in the belief that the best is yet to come with a digitized and scaled generative chemistry platform. Expect them to build foundational technology at the interface of computation, chemistry, and biology. If you’re eager to push in the same direction—reach out!
We couldn’t be more excited to partner again with The Column Group (TCG) to co-lead Kimia’s Series A financing. For nearly a decade, TCG has been a stellar partner of ours where in prior lives we co-founded and locked arms to back exceptional biotech teams. Kimia’s leadership is no exception.
As Stig and the team say, chemistry is the key.
Be sure to watch this (chemical) space.
The Dimension Team
