With $50M from Versant, Lycia takes targeted degradation outside the cell

Fourteen months after leading biochemist Carolyn Bertozzi published a preprint on a new class of compounds that degrade extracellular proteins inaccessible to PROTACs, Versant-built Lycia has emerged with $50 million to turn that technology into therapies.

“We saw this as an opportunity for completely new ways of doing protein degradation focused on extracellular proteins, which make up about 40% of proteins overall,” said Versant Ventures’ Clare Ozawa...