Watertown-based Dicerna Pharmaceuticals today announced it had closed a $60 million funding round led by new investor RA Capital.
Dicerna?s CEO, Douglas M. Fambrough, said the company will use the money to advance it?s cancer drug, DCR-M1711, to clinical trials with humans.
?The first program we?ll test is a gene researchers have known about for 35 years,? Fambrough said. ?It?s a gene that?s inappropriately turned on, driving cancer, and researchers have never had a way to turn it back off.?
Dicerna has been working on the concept for about four years, he said, and about a year ago, it began to test the drug in animals.
Using the new funding, the company will begin two clinical trials ? each with 35 to 40 people ? early next year, Fambrough said.
One trial will treat people with different types of tumors, he said. The second trial will treat people who have liver cancer.
?We think it?s particularly likely it will work best in liver cancer patients,? Fambrough said.
If the drug does well, it will advance to larger trials and could be on the market in five years, he said.
?We?re talking about cancers that kill people,? Fambrough said. ?We really want to get things done quickly. But five years is fast in cancer research.?
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