Ten63 Therapeutics Closes Strategic Financing, Bringing Total Funding Past USD 45m
Ten63 Therapeutics, a Durham, North Carolina–based AI drug discovery company developing small molecules against targets long considered undruggable, has closed a strategic financing round that brings its total funding to more than USD 45 million. The company, which is built around a proprietary computational platform called BEYOND, did not disclose the specific amount raised in this latest tranche. Ten63 said the capital will be used to scale its AI-driven drug discovery platform and advance an internal oncology pipeline focused on targets that have resisted decades of conventional drug development efforts.
Chugai Venture Fund, Gates Foundation Among New Backers
The round drew new investment from Chugai Venture Fund — the venture arm of Japanese pharmaceutical company Chugai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. — and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Additional new investors included RYSE, K5 Global, SF Holdings, Duke Capital Partners, Cape Fear BioCapital, Black Opal Ventures, and Panorama. They joined an existing syndicate comprising Hatteras Venture Partners, Yosemite, Morpheus Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, and Draper Associates, the company said.
In connection with the financing, Mike Dial, Ph.D., Managing Director of Chugai Venture Fund, joined Ten63's board of directors.
The company said the increased funding will fuel further development of the BEYOND discovery platform and support the advancement of its preclinical pipeline. Ten63 also received a grant from the Gates Foundation — separate from the equity investment — to support work on affordable small-molecule therapeutics targeting human papillomavirus (HPV), the most common sexually transmitted infection worldwide and a leading cause of cervical cancer.
Preclinical Pipeline Targets Myc and HPV Viral Proteins
Ten63 does not appear to have any active clinical-stage programs registered in public trial databases. The company's pipeline is preclinical and centers on what it describes as first- and best-in-class small molecules against oncology targets that have historically been considered undruggable.
The most prominently discussed program targets Myc, an oncogene implicated in an estimated 70% of all cancers. Myc has been a subject of drug discovery efforts for more than four decades, but no approved therapy directly inhibits the protein. Ten63 said it has Myc-targeting therapeutics in active preclinical development that it claims surpass all previous attempts at Myc inhibition, though no peer-reviewed data supporting this assertion have been publicly disclosed.
A second disclosed area of focus involves HPV-associated cancers. HPV causes cancer in more than 650,000 women and men each year globally, and while vaccines exist for prevention, treatment options for established HPV lesions — particularly in low- and middle-income countries — remain limited. Ten63 said its BEYOND platform is being applied to develop cost-effective small molecules targeting viral proteins that drive HPV-related malignancies. This work is being conducted with support from the Gates Foundation grant and in collaboration with researchers at the University of Oxford.
External sources have also indicated that Ten63 has a KRAS G12D inhibitor at the preclinical stage for neoplasms, though the company did not reference this program in its latest announcement.
The BEYOND Platform: Large Quantum Chemistry Models for Artificial Intelligence Drug Discovery
The BEYOND platform — which stands for Binding Evolution Yields Original New Drugs — is described by Ten63 as the world's first Large Quantum Chemistry Model (LQCM). The company says the platform delivers quantum-mechanics-level simulations at speeds orders of magnitude faster than other computational approaches, enabling it to simulate trillions of potential drug molecules per protein target while retaining accuracy approaching that of laboratory experiments.