Merck's Perlmutter joins start-up; closes $148 million Series A

Eikon Therapeutics, a pioneer in live-cell super-resolution microscopy and engineering for drug discovery, today announced that it has closed a $148 million Series A financing led by The Column Group with participation from Foresite Capital, Innovation Endeavors and Lux Capital.

The company also announced the appointment of Dr Roger Perlmutter as its new chief executive officer.

Eikon’s drug discovery platform evolved from super-resolution microscopy, a ground-breaking approach to elucidating the behavior of proteins in live cells. Super-resolution microscopy was first developed by Eric Betzig, and collaborators, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 for this work. Dr Betzig, Xavier Darzacq, Luke Lavis, and Robert Tjian, founded Eikon to industrialize this novel technology and to apply the tracking of protein dynamics to key applications across the drug discovery process.