MedImmune's venture arm has jumped in to lead a $12.5 million round for a Chapel Hill, NC-based startup that is working on a new drug to treat a common ailment spurred by chemotherapy. G1 Therapeutics, which was initially seeded by Hatteras Venture Partners to the tune of $600,000, says that the new funds will finance its IND work and point the company to proof-of-concept data on a drug designed to protect against myelosuppression--the loss of blood cells--during chemo. Hatteras Venture Partners and Mountain Group Capital contributed to the round.
G1 was founded on the work of Norman Sharpless at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Kwok-Kin Wong at Harvard Medical School. They concluded that a cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 inhibitor could play a big role in protecting the bone marrow of chemo patients.