OnKure aims for $60M in new funding round

BOULDER — Biopharmaceutical company OnKure Inc. has raised nearly $54 million of a $60 million funding round, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a statement emailed to BizWest on Monday, a company spokeswoman said that, “at this time, the company cannot provide any additional comments or information outside of the filing.”

OnKure, headquartered at 6707 Winchester Circle in the Gunbarrel neighborhood of northeast Boulder, raised $3.26 million in a Series A-1 investment in 2020 and  $55 million in a round of Series B fundraising in 2021. Its therapeutics division expanded its workspace with the opening of a new research laboratory in April 2021.

The company is continuing trials of treatments intended to aid patients with advanced mutations of certain skin cancers, and provided its first study patient with the treatment last June. The therapy, a combination of its drug candidate OKI-179 and a mitogen-activated protein kinase enzyme inhibitor, is thought to treat skin cancers by inhibiting activity caused by a specific mutation in NRAS, a genetic marker that is susceptible to mutation into an aggressive cancer-producing cell. The U.S. National Institutes of Health estimates that 15% to 20% of all melanomas are caused by that specific genetic mutation.

In 2020, OnKure and Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) began the process to initiate a proof-of-concept study for OKI-179 in combination with Pfizer’s already-approved Mektovi drug. Mektovi was originally developed by the formerly Boulder-based Array Biopharma, which Pfizer acquired in 2021 for $11 billion.

Incorporated in 2011 and boosted the next year by a $250,000 grant from the state’s Bioscience Discovery Evaluation Grant Program, OnKure is a spinoff of University of Colorado technology led by Array BioPharma co-founder Tony Piscopio.

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