Venturing into diabetes

While many VCs have deemed chronic diseases such as diabetes a no-fly zone because of clinical development costs, investors in Metacrine Inc.'s $36 million series A round are taking a contrarian approach. The expectation is the company's underlying science and management team with a track record of exits will justify the funding.

Metacrine has an exclusive license to two preclinical programs that originated in the lab of Ronald Evans, a nuclear hormone receptor expert who is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and director of the gene expression laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. ...