Drug discovery and development company Eikon Therapeutics closed $148 million in Series A financing and appointed Roger Perlmutter CEO. Eikon’s drug discovery platform uses superresolution microscopy, an approach that elucidates the behavior of proteins in live cells.
Superresolution microscopy was developed by Eric Betzig and collaborators, who received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2014. The company’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) includes Betzig, who is a co-founder of Eikon Therapeutics.
Perlmutter was previously an executive vice president at Merck and president of Merck Research Laboratories. Under his leadership, Merck received more than 100 regulatory approvals for its medicines and vaccines globally, including those for multiple cancers, diabetes, and infectious diseases. Perlmutter helped Merck establish KEYTRUDA as a foundational immunotherapy for cancer care. He was also executive vice president and head of R&D at Amgen for more than a decade.
Eikon’s SAB is additionally composed of Tom Cech, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and former president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Juan Jaen, president and co-founder of Arcus Biosciences; Larry Latsky, partner at The Column Group; Fei-Fei Li, the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence; Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman of Google and founding partner of Innovation Endeavors; and Robert Tjian, former president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and co-founder of Eikon Therapeutics.
In a press release, the company said it will integrate engineering, advanced optics, and machine learning alongside molecular biology and medicinal chemistry to industrialize the tracking of protein dynamics.
