Belharra Therapeutics Exits Stealth With $130 Million And A Genentech Deal

Belharra Therapeutics has emerged from stealth with a $130 million, a multi-year partnership with Roche’s Genentech, and a mission to change the face of drug discovery with photoaffinity-based chemoproteomics.

The company’s founding investor, Versant Ventures, helped raise $50 million in Series A financing, while the remaining $80 million came as an upfront payment from Genentech. 

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Chemoproteomics That Overcome Traditional Screening 

Belharra’s chemoproteomics-based drug discovery engine uses chemical probes to explore protein-ligand interactions within the cell. The platform utilizes photoaffinity-based labeling to “trap” these unique non-covalent interactions. By attaching labels to protein targets, Belharra’s platform could potentially reveal novel druggable pockets across the full range of protein classes and targets, enabling profiling of the proteome. 

The platform improves on earlier chemoproteomics, which required nucleophilic amino acid residues such as cysteine to be present on the protein of interest. This traditionally limited drug targets to those with ligandable residues, while the ligand-binding could be irreversible and complicate the development path.

Moreover, photochemistry is used to identify protein-ligand interactions and as the ligand binding is non-covalent, this lowers the risk of irreversibility.  

“We’ve expanded the power of traditional chemoproteomic screening approaches and integrated them into a single drug discovery engine that enables, for the first time, the ability to target the full range of protein classes and targets,” said Jeff Jonker, CEO of Belharra. The platform could enable the researchers to rapidly rescreen all previously “undruggable” protein targets to identify non-covalent drug-like ligands for functional binding pockets, he added. 

Belharra’s platform is the brainchild of scientific founders Christopher G. Parker, Ph.D., John Teijaro, Ph.D., and Ben Cravatt, Ph.D., at Scripps Research. Stuart Schreiber of the Broad Institute joined as a co-founder to provide input on using the platform for innovative drug discovery and broad therapeutic application.

Based on targeted and phenotypic screens run by Scripps and Belharra, the company expects to generate a pipeline of oncology and immunology candidates in 2023. 

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Joy Lin

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