Think Bioscience raises $26M to find ‘pockets’ for drug therapies

BOULDER — Think Bioscience Inc. has raised a $26 million seed round — including a recently completed $6 million expansion of the initial fundraise — to develop small-molecule therapeutics that target “undruggable” proteins.

“Ultimately, the biochemical properties of any small-molecule drug are constrained by its binding site, a pocket on its protein target. Despite advances in computational chemistry and structural biology, new functional pockets remain challenging to find,” the company said in a news release. “Think’s pocket-finding process programs microbes to build small molecules that bind to functional pockets, and they use these pockets to find hits in drug-like space. They have extended their platform technology to a striking variety of targets such as protein tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs), kinases (PTKs), proteases, and GTPases.”

The seed round was led by existing Think Bioscience investors and YK Bioventures.

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“Nature has endowed living systems with an extraordinary ability to build potent bioactive compounds, usually to fulfill important ecological functions, such as defense,” Think CEO Jerome Fox said in the release. “We are using a similar selection process to discover new functional pockets on challenging drug targets. New pockets are gold.”