Interline Therapeutics Inks $92M For Drug Discovery

Interline Therapeutics launched its company Thursday following the raise of $92 million in total funding to support the company’s mission to map and correct dysfunctional protein communities.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The round includes a combination of seed and Series A rounds that closed simultaneously in the first quarter, CEO Zachary Sweeney told Crunchbase News. Foresite Capital and ARCH Venture Partners co-led the financing, which will be used to expand Interline’s research platform and advance its six preclinical therapeutic programs.

Interline, headquartered in San Francisco and Boston, was incubated in Foresite Labs in late 2020, and Sweeney joined as CEO in September 2020 from Denali Therapeutics.

“I learned about Foresite Labs and their commitment to data-rich drug discovery,” Sweeney said. “Vik [Bajaj] and his team are developing new company concepts and have an amazing network. I was looking for that balance of having a network with a defined mission that was pro entrepreneur, so we shared that vision.”

Interline’s drug discovery platform enables the company to determine protein communities and understand how disease and drugs influence them. From there, it can identify new medicines targeting diseases, such as inflammatory disease and cancer.

The company is centered around Sweeney’s vision, and as the industry evolves, is going to be among a new breed of platform companies, said Vikram Bajaj, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Foresite Labs.

“We knew we needed to have a CEO who not only understood biology and chemistry, but had a vision to push the idea forward,” Bajaj said in an interview. “One of the best parts is our partnership with ARCH, that Zach brought along, and there is no one better to support this level of ambition.”

Interline has a team of 15 that is likely to be 35 by the end of the year, Sweeney said.

The ultimate goal for the company is getting drugs to patients that need them, and Interline is working to remove the lag time between genetic discoveries and the drug discovery, Sweeney said.

“The synergies between the technologies — from physics to biology to genetics — converged in the past five year to enable what we are doing,” he added. “We think we are going to change the way drug discovery is done and change the foundation that will be expected for drug projects in the future.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias