Perlmutter's Eikon raises $351m in major financing round
Eikon Therapeutics has added to its already copious cash reserves with a $351 million fourth-round financing to fund a rapidly expanding clinical pipeline of cancer therapies.
Eikon Therapeutics has added to its already copious cash reserves with a $351 million fourth-round financing to fund a rapidly expanding clinical pipeline of cancer therapies.
Eikon Therapeutics, a biotech that snatched several big-name executives from Merck & Co. and raked in some of the largest financing rounds in recent memory, has cut staff in an effort to “become more efficient.”
Led by biopharma titan Roger Perlmutter, Eikon Therapeutics kicked off 2022 with a Series B financing worth $517.8 million. The Bay Area-based biotech made another splash Thursday, announcing a $106 million Series C raise and the acquisition of exclusive, global rights to several early- to mid-stage assets.
The leadership team of California-based Eikon Therapeutics is beginning to look a lot like Merck 2.0 with the addition of Kenneth C. Frazier to the company's board of directors. Frazier, executive chairman and former chief executive officer of Merck, joins former colleagues Roger Perlmutter and Roy Baynes at the well-financed company.
Eikon, which is pioneering a live-cell super-resolution microscopy that allows its researchers to measure the real-time movement of individual proteins in living cells, is helmed by Perlmutter, the former president of Merck Research Laboratories.
In 2014, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three men whose work helped change the way microscopes work. For centuries, in order to observe cells in the body on a microscopic level, they had to be fixed in place. You couldn’t see them as they were working. “The only way to visualize them were as static images frozen in time,” says Roger Perlmutter, CEO of Eikon Therapeutics.
It did not take too long for industry veteran Roger Perlmutter, the former president of Merck Research Laboratories, to find a new job after leaving the pharma giant at the end of 2020. Perlmutter will helm drug discovery startup Eikon Therapeutics, Inc.
After seven years running Merck’s R&D engine, much of which has revolved around cancer blockbuster Keytruda and, now, COVID-19 vaccines, Roger Perlmutter, M.D., Ph.D., is hitting the exit.
His last day will be Jan. 1, leaving after rejoining the Big Pharma back in 2013 and now with 100 regulatory approvals for drugs and vaccines under his belt. He will be replaced by Dean Li, M.D., Ph.D., currently senior vice president of discovery sciences and translational medicine at Merck Research Labs (MRL).