Lilly backs precision medicine start-up’s $65 million raise

Eli Lilly and Company is investing in a precision medicine start-up that promises to engineer drugs for more targeted delivery. Ampersand Biomedicines has raised $65 million in a series B financing round with investment from the pharmaceutical giant and Ampersand’s founding firm, Flagship Pioneering. The start-up will use the funding to wrap up preclinical work on two new immunological drug candidates, one focused on inflammation and the other on cancer. The series B is Ampersand’s first venture capital financing since it launched with $50 million from Flagship 2 years ago . CEO Jason Gardner declines to share specifics about the exact targets or compositions of those two lead compounds, or when they might advance into human trials. But he does say they’re engineered as improved versions of existing drugs—“parent molecules,” which could be anything from early-stage drug candidates to approved treatments—with tweaks for better potency and tolerability. “Basically, they came