Kronos Bio Completes $105 Million Financing Round

“We are excited to have the continued support of high caliber investors who recognize the potential of Kronos’ technology and its team. This financing will help us advance two preclinical programs…, accelerate our research, and further expand the Kronos team in the Boston and San Francisco areas,” said Norbert Bischofberger, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Kronos. “We seek to challenge the historic belief that certain targets cannot be pursued. Our goal is to unlock new therapeutic approaches and bring treatments to areas with high unmet need.”

Kronos’ Small Molecule Microarray platform (SMM) was built on more than a decade of research by its scientific founder, Angela Koehler, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT.  SMM is ideally suited for the rapid discovery of novel modulators or degraders of historically undruggable targets, such as transcription factors.

Kronos has demonstrated SMM’s potential to identify compounds that bind to target proteins directly or interfere at nanomolar potency with protein activity. SMM enables discovery of hits that act through a variety of mechanisms, including disruption of protein-protein or protein-DNA interactions, or indirect modulation of target protein activity by binding to co-factors or other protein complex members.

Existing therapies target only a minority of the body’s proteins, which are well-structured and accessible to traditional small molecule approaches.  The majority of proteins, however, are disordered or lack obvious binding pockets and have historically been considered undruggable.  Kronos’ platform enables high-throughput screens of chemical libraries against such target proteins in a more physiologically relevant context to identify biologically active small molecules. (Source: Kronos Bio Website, 19 July, 2019)