Cancer research is always evolving, as scientists search for ways to combat the tricks tumors use to evade drug therapies. In the last decade alone, immunotherapies, targeted therapies, antibody-drug conjugates and radiopharmaceuticals have become standard treatment for a variety of tumors.

Yet none are silver bullets, leaving room for young companies testing out new ideas, like Delphia Therapeutics, which launched on Thursday with $67 million in funding.

“To get a different outcome for patients requires a different approach,” said Delphia co-founder and CEO Kevin Marks.

The company aims to pioneer an approach to targeted treatment it calls “activation lethality.” According to Marks, the method is “like a cousin” to synthetic lethality, another way of attacking tumors that’s drawn interest from large and small drugmakers in recent years.

Drugs built around synthetic lethality disrupt genes important to a cancer cell’s survival. For example, so-called PARP inhibitors, like AstraZeneca and Merck & Co.’s Lynparza, interfere with PARP enzymes, shutting off a mechanism certain tumors use to repair DNA.

Similarly, most other targeted therapies stifle the effects of mutations that drive tumor growth in one way or another.

Activation lethality medicines, by contrast, are supposed to selectively supercharge, or overactivate, certain cancer-linked cell signaling to the point tumor cells can’t survive. Marks likens the concept to slamming the gas pedal of a car that’s already speeding out of control.

“In a cancer, that engine is revving just about as high as it can,” Marks said. “If you push it to rev even more, it overheats the engine and stalls out the car completely.”

Delphia’s approach is based on research conducted by a team led by Bill Sellers, director of the cancer program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The company says activation lethality represents a new way to counteract drug resistance.

“We’ll have a fundamentally different challenge for cancers to try to evolve and escape from,” said Marks, who previously oversaw cancer drug discovery at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research along with Mike Dillon, one of Delphia’s other co-founders.

Delphia hasn’t disclosed which targets it’s going after, but Marks said the funding should get the company to the “doorstep” of its first clinical trials.

Delphia takes its name from Greek history. Etched on the walls of the temple of Apollo in the city of Delphi was the phrase “nothing in excess,” a concept the biotech is applying to cancer therapy.

The company’s Series A round was led by GV, Nextech Invest, Polaris Innovation Fund and Alexandria Venture Investments.

Marks, an entrepreneur-in-residence at GV since 2022, said the company “smoothly sailed through” what’s been a tough financing environment for biotech startups.

“[The investors] saw the almost month-over-month the progress we’re making, these new targets and this new field catching fire,” he said.

“Delphia’s activation lethality platform is one of the most innovative approaches in cancer drug development and offers an excellent foundation to build a differentiated oncology company,” David Schenkein, the former Agios Pharmaceuticals CEO and now co-lead of GV’s life science investment team, said in a statement.