Durham biotech company raises $118M to aid development of cancer treatments
Shattuck Labs, a biotechnology company with offices in Research Triangle Park, said Monday that it had raised $118 million from investors.
That is the largest investment deal for a Triangle startup so far in 2020, a year that many have predicted to be a down one for the region’s startup scene.
The round was led by Redmile Group, an investment firm based in San Francisco — but Durham-based Hatteras Venture Partners, which has invested in many of Research Triangle Park’s most promising biotech companies, also put money into the company.
Founded in 2016, the biotech company has created a platform called Agonist Redirected Checkpoint, on which it is developing novel cancer and autoimmune disease treatments. Prior to this, Shattuck had raised around $80 million, according to venture capital tracker Crunchbase.
The money will be used to accelerate the clinical development of two of its potential treatments, Shattuck’s CEO Taylor Schreiber said in a statement. Schreiber is the former chief scientific officer of another Durham biotech company, Heat Biologics.
While Shattuck has offices split between the Parmer RTP campus in Research Triangle Park and in Austin, Texas, all of the company’s science and laboratories are based in Durham. Schreiber, the company’s CEO, also is based here. Shattuck Labs did not respond to a request for comment on the new round of funding.
The $118 million raise is a significant haul.
Last year, the two largest startup investments in the Triangle were Pendo, whose $100 million raise last October officially brought that startup’s valuation to $1 billion, and AskBio, a Research Triangle Park-based gene therapy company, that brought in $235 million.
The money will be used to fund two of Shattuck’s potential cancer treatments, which are in phase one clinical trials. One of those treatments is being developed with Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
Douglas Reed, who was part of the Hatteras Venture Partners team that invested in Shattuck, said he believes this company “could be a monster success.”
“You see the value of some of these biotech companies with just one successful cancer drug,” he said in a phone interview, “and if this is anywhere as good as we think this could be, it could have five or eight.”
He added that Shattuck has the potential to file an initial public offering in the future to help finance further developments of its treatments.
And despite the coronavirus pandemic, Reed said, Hatteras continues to see a lot of opportunities in which to invest money.
“I do think work in the lab has slowed down,” Reed said “... But the menu of opportunities to invest in has not slowed down. I expected we would see a slow down, but that hasn’t really happened.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published June 15, 2020 at 12:24 PM with the headline "Durham biotech company raises $118M to aid development of cancer treatments."
