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Finance Watch: Morphic's 'Smooth' Progress With Oral Integrin Inhibitors Justifies $80m Series B

 
• By Mandy Jackson

Private Company Edition: Morphic raises $80m to take its first two integrin inhibitors into the clinic for fibrosis and inflammatory bowel disease. Also, Hillhouse has a new $10.6bn private equity fund for health care and other investments, and Atreca closes a $125m Series C.

Finance Watch

Coming from a fairly large firm – Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc. – before its $8.4bn acquisition by Merck & Co. Inc. in 2014, Morphic Therapeutic Inc. President and CEO Praveen Tipirneni said he expected more volatility working for the first time at a small start-up, "but it's been a pretty smooth ride."

Morphic launched in 2015 to develop oral small molecule integrin inhibitors based on the research of integrin discoverer Tim Springer at Harvard Medical School and raised $51.5m in Series A venture capital in 2016. (Also see "VC Roundup: More Funds Raise Cash For Biotech; Morphic Closes $51.5m Series A" - Scrip, 4 July, 2016.) Now that its lead drug candidate is headed for the clinic in 2019, the Waltham, Mass

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