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Dr. Milenko Cicmil

Tasca Therapeutics

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Founder Stories

Dr. Milenko Cicmil’s Story on How Tasca Came to Be

Unlocking post-translational modification to expand the druggable proteome

April 27, 2023

As a veteran in the world of drug discovery, the beginnings of my partnership with Cure Ventures and the building of Tasca Therapeutics can be linked back to a single walk in the park with one of the founding partners, Dave Fallace. This walk was particularly impactful as we got lost (first figuratively, and then literally) telling stories about our experiences in pharmaceuticals, our ambitions for building companies and making curative therapies possible, and how we could tactfully approach this to bring this concept to fruition. Fast forward a few years when I discovered the work of my co-founder Dr. Xu Wu, who pioneered a novel platform to identify unique targets and reach the undruggable proteome, and I knew exactly who to partner with to make a company around this technology. Soon after, Tasca became Cure’s first seed company, setting the groundwork for many more to come.

‘’

We spent a lot of time with the Cure team scrutinizing our data to ensure the science we were seeing was viable, shaping the strategy from a platform point of view for our lead asset, and setting up labs and research organizations to perform our experiments. You can’t do that with just any investor.

– Dr. Milenko Cicmil, Tasca Therapeutics

 

The technology behind Tasca is complex and the process of forming and growing a company around it requires more than an investor signing a check. We spent a lot of time with the Cure team scrutinizing our data to ensure the science we were seeing was viable, shaping the strategy from a platform point of view for our lead asset, and setting up labs and research organizations to perform our experiments. You can’t do that with just any investor; if you want to build companies that are successful in the biotech industry, you need scientists. Part of what makes Cure a uniquely valuable partner is that they are acutely aware of this. Having scientists around the table to guide decisions and jump into operational roles when necessary was critical to moving Tasca’s science forward. In fact, the bioinformatics expertise Cure provided has even revealed new findings about our own MoA that we weren’t aware of before!

With seed funding and hands-on help from Cure, Tasca has been able to perform the early phase experiments and build a data package that de-risks our platform, thus providing a solid foundation as we move forward. We are unlocking post-translational modification of proteins by using our proprietary platform to develop small molecule drugs for multiple oncology indications and I’m excited to say Tasca’s lead candidate, a dual inhibitor for tumor metabolic synergy, is entering IND-enabling studies. We found a partner with Cure that figured out how to say “yes” and having them on our side puts Tasca on the best position to continue growing and advancing our therapeutics to their next milestones.

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