Flindr Therapeutics BV secures €20m Series A financing

The Series A financing was led by V-Bio Ventures and an international syndicate that includes Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc., QBIC Fund, Flanders Future Tech Fund, Curie Capital as well as seed investors Oncode Oncology Bridge Fund, Swanbridge and Brabantse Ontwikkelings Maatschappij (BOM). The precision oncology therapeutics developer said it will use the €20m to advance its pipeline of first-in-class, small molecule inhibitors for treatment of cancer, particularly its lead program RNF31 to IND.

Flindr utilizes the “ImmunoGram Drug Discovery Engine”, which has evolved from seminal work in the laboratories of the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) and the Oncode Institute. This approach involves reverse-translating the heterogeneity in tumour-specific and host-specific factors, as commonly seen in patients in the clinic, into lab-based biological models to screen for and select the most important drug targets involved in patient clinical response.

Flindr’s lead program is a first-in-class small molecule inhibitor of RNF31 (also known as HOIP), a protein-stabilizing E3 ubiquitin ligase which is aberrantly activated in solid and hematological malignancies. The company has already obtained promising activity for the drug candidate in preclinical ovarian cancer and B-cell lymphoma models, and identified biomarkers which will help select patients most likely to respond to treatment with RNF31 inhibitors. Flindr will also use the funds to develop a second program, and broaden its pipeline using the ImmunoGram Drug Discovery Engine.

Flindr Therapeutics was created in 2020, with Maarten Ligtenberg as the founding CEO, and initial seed financing from Oncode Oncology Bridge Fund, Swanbridge Capital and Innovatiefonds Noord Holland. In 2023, Flindr joined forces with VIB, Flanders’ leading life sciences research institute, and the lab of Professor Rudi Beyaert (of the VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research), to leverage their expertise of immunology – including RNF31 biology – and development of animal cancer models. Their work with Flindr in these areas moght provide further validation of RNF31 as a target and will enable the Company to make safety predictions.