Siduma Therapeutics, a Yale spinout from Arvinas scientific founder Craig Crews, has closed, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to Endpoints News via email Thursday.
“In response to the challenging funding environment for early-stage science, Siduma Therapeutics’ leadership has made the difficult decision to suspend operations and return investment back to our shareholders,” the spokesperson wrote.
Dozens of biotechs have cited a difficult funding landscape when deciding to wind down in the past few years.
Craig CrewsAccording to a 2021 SEC filing, Siduma had raised at least $31 million. The fledgling company’s investors included Sequoia Capital China, Andreessen Horowitz, Casdin Capital, Connecticut Innovations, Elm Street Ventures and EQRx, according to an archived version of Siduma’s website.
News of the shuttering came on the same day Crews’ most recognizable venture, the oral protein degrader developer Arvinas, announced a $150 million upfront pact with Novartis.
Siduma looked to build off the decades of research on heterobifunctional small molecules in Crews’ lab at Yale. The goal was to target disease-causing proteins, according to an old job posting.
“Dr. Craig Crews and the Crews Lab at Yale University plan to continue to advance the development of our heterobifunctional platform going forward,” the spokesperson said.
Siduma was located near the Yale campus in New Haven, CT, and was one of the first tenants in the Elm City Bioscience Center, per a post from Yale last summer. Arvinas still has a large presence in New Haven, and another Crews-founded biotech, Halda Therapeutics, is also located in the city.
Last February, Halda emerged with $76 million to create new medicines for patients who have resistance to existing drugs by using small molecules to “hold and kill” tumor cells by blocking key functions of the targeted protein, Crews explained to Endpoints at the time.