BRIEF—Matchpoint looks for new drugs in immunology

A new precision medicine company, Matchpoint Therapeutics, has launched in Massachusetts, USA, with a total of $100 million in financing.

The firm, which is focused on making use of “the powerful properties of covalency,” has been backed by Sanofi Ventures as well as Vertex Ventures and a range of other investors.

The money will be used to support advancement of the company’s proprietary Advanced Covalent Exploration (ACE) platform and its pipeline of novel covalent molecules, with an initial focus on immunology.

Chief executive Andre Turenne said the firm was seeking to “enable the targeting of disease-causing proteins otherwise unamenable to small molecule intervention.”

He added: “We believe the immunology space is greatly underserved by current small molecule therapies and are excited by the potential of our proprietary platform to deliver highly specific covalent medicines for several of its most important and difficult targets.”