Monte Rosa Bags $95 Million Series C Funding to Advance Protein Degraders

On March 12th, Boston-based Monte Rosa Therapeutics announced the closure of a $95 million Series C financing led by Avoro Capital Advisors. The funding will mainly facilitate the company’s pipeline growth and lead development candidates into the clinic. Besides, it will also foster the capability of Monte’s next-generation protein degradation platform to design and develop small molecule degraders, or molecular glues, that hijacks the body’s innate ability to degrade proteins.

“Molecular glue degraders represent a powerful and differentiated approach to eradicating disease-causing proteins,” said Behzad Aghazadeh, Ph.D., Managing Partner, Avoro Capital Advisors. “Coupled with Monte Rosa’s world-class team and drug discovery platform enabled by their machine learning-based prediction of degrons, the company is poised to rapidly expand the previously undruggable target universe and foster a new generation of therapeutics.”

Monte Rosa’s Protein Degradation Platform

Cells have developed their own sophisticated machinery to regulate the expression, folding and proper degradation of proteins. However, time and again, those mechanisms falter, resulting in the accumulation of misfolded proteins, which eventually prove damaging to the cell. Several untreatable diseases or cancers driven by such phenomena have posed challenges as they were undruggable. However, several companies have now come up with a solution.

Monte Rosa Therapeutics is aided by a strong team of protein degradation experts and boasts significant progress in one of its leading candidates. The company was launched last year by Versant’s Discovery Engine, Ridgeline, together with experts from The Institute of Cancer Research (IRCR) in London. MRT-048 is a successful small-molecule compound that demonstrated potential as a novel breakthrough in treating breast cancer.

Since the launch, Monte Rosa has created a platform to design small molecules to re-program ubiquitin ligases to eradicate disease drivers that were previously untreatable. The platform is unique in that it harbors diverse and proprietary chemical libraries of small molecule protein degraders with in-house proteomics, structural biology, machine learning-based target selection, and computational chemistry capabilities to forecast protein degradation profiles.

Apart from the powerful platform, one advantage of Monte Rosa’s degraders is that it helps bind E3 ligases to regulate protein in the degradation process, to glue the undegraded proteins without the need of available binding sites. It is very different from other small molecule degraders such as PROTAC that acts like inhibitors and therefore requires binding sites to demonstrate its efficacy which more or less decreases their effects.

“By leveraging the power of nature’s protein degradation pathways, our next-generation approach is purpose-built to target the undruggable proteome and eliminate disease-driving proteins with high precision,” said Markus Warmuth, M.D., CEO of Monte Rosa.

“With extensive and compelling in vivo data in hand, we are confident in the potential of our molecular glue-based targeted protein degradation platform to deliver breakthrough small molecule therapeutics. As we prepare to initiate IND-enabling studies on our lead candidate later this year, and with additional programs transitioning into lead optimization, we are thrilled to have the continued support of such a strong group of new and existing investors who share in our vision.”

Funding Sources

Since its inception, Monte Rosa has secured $32.5 million in funding and then followed with the closing of a Series B financing round with $96 million in September 2020.

Fidelity Management & Research Company, BlackRock, T. Rowe Price Associates, RTW Investments, Versant Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and many others also participated in the latest Series C financing.

By Judy Ya-Hsuan Lin

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Judy Ya-Hsuan Lin

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.