by Nicole DeFeudis

EndPoints Editor

While José Mejía Oneto was an orthopedic surgery resident at UC Davis, he learned an intriguing yet frustrating fact: Only small amounts of a drug — in some cases just 1% or 2% of what’s administered — actually make it to the target location.

That concerning fact left Mejía Oneto with one question, one that would change the trajectory of his entire career — how can we better control where drugs go?

Early Thursday morning, his startup Shasqi unveiled $50 million in new cash to explore just that. The Series B round brings Shasqi’s total raise up to $60 million, and should see the biotech’s lead candidate into a Phase II study in solid tumors.

Mejía Oneto launched Shasqi back in 2015 and homed in on something called “click chemistry.” The term was coined by Nobel laureate Karl Barry Sharpless back in 2001, and Mejía Oneto describes it as two compounds that “react with each other and ignore the rest of the world.”

A paper in ScienceDirect defines the phenomena as “a collection of organic reactions that proceed rapidly and selectively under mild conditions to covalently link molecular components.” The “click” refers to the potential to join molecules as if fastening a seat belt, according to a book titled “Fluorine, a key element for the 21st century.”

Shasqi is essentially looking to see if they can inject a