Peel Therapeutics closes Series A for nature-inspired cancer drugs
What's the deal? Peel TherapeuticsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a clinical-stage biotech that mines evolutionary biology for cancer therapies, has closed the first tranche of its Series A round. The funding was disclosed by Altitude LabDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the Salt Lake City incubator that helped launch the company. The round's size and investors remain undisclosed.
The company draws drug candidates from unlikely sources: elephant tumour suppressor genes, toxins from Chinese trees, and honeybee venom peptides. Its lead programme, PEEL-224, is a topoisomerase I inhibitor derived from camptothecin — a molecule found in the bark of the Camptotheca acuminata tree — engineered to reduce toxicity and dodge resistance mechanisms.
Peel operates across Salt Lake City and Haifa, Israel. CEO Joshua Schiffman is also a paediatric haematologist-oncologist at the University of Utah, while co-founder Avi Schroeder runs a targeted drug delivery lab at Israel's Technion.
Why now? The funding arrives as PEEL-224 has completed its first-in-human Phase 1 dose-escalation study and moved into a Phase 1/2 combination trial targeting adolescents and young adults with relapsed or refractory sarcomas — cancers that have already resisted standard treatment.
Before this Series A, Peel raised a $36M seed round, including a $9M SAFE note in early 2023, and secured over $3M in non-dilutive NIH grants. That earlier fundraise brought Ryan Watts, chief executive of Denali Therapeutics, and Carin Canale-Theakston, chief executive of Evoke Canale, to the board.
What could go wrong? Paediatric oncology trials are notoriously difficult to enrol and execute. The undisclosed round size raises questions about whether Peel has enough capital to advance multiple programmes simultaneously. Its pipeline beyond PEEL-224 — including an elephant-derived p53 gene therapy using lipid nanoparticles and a honeybee venom peptide — hasn't reached the clinic yet.
The nature-inspired approach is scientifically compelling but unproven commercially. Translating evolutionary biology insights into viable drugs is a long road, and each candidate faces its own set of regulatory and scientific hurdles.
The signal: Peel's $36M seed round was unusually large for a nature-derived oncology platform, yet the company remains classified as early stage on Dealroom, underscoring how capital-intensive it is to push unconventional drug candidates through clinical development. With Altitude Lab acting as both incubator and disclosed backer, the Series A close suggests the company's preclinical thesis is beginning to generate enough clinical evidence to sustain investor confidence — though the undisclosed round size hints that the fundraise may still be a work in progress.
Read more: founderland.ai
