GRO Biosciences, a Cambridge, MA-based biotechnology company leveraging synthetic biology, raised $60.3M in Series B funding.
The round, which brought the total amount to more than $90M, was led by Atlas Venture and Access Biotechnology. Previous investors including Leaps by Bayer, Redmile Group, Digitalis Ventures and Innovation Endeavors also participated. In connection with the financing, Kevin Bitterman, PhD, Partner at Atlas Venture and Dan Becker, MD, PhD, Managing Director at Access Biotechnology, have joined the company’s Board of Directors.
The company intends to use the funds to advance its lead program into the clinic for the treatment of refractory gout, to broaden the GRObio pipeline, and to expand its genomically recoded organism (GRO) platform for scalable production of therapeutics incorporating multiple non-standard amino acids (NSAAs).
Led by CEO Dan Mandell, GRO Biosciences is advancing a lead program, ProGly-Uricase, which is being developed for the treatment of severe, refractory gout, a type of arthritis that causes debilitating inflammation in joints due to excessive accumulation of uric acid.
ProGly-Uricase is a proprietary uricase enzyme incorporating the company’s ProGly NSAAs to prevent the emergence of ADAs and enable patients with severe, refractory gout to maintain long-term effective control of serum uric acid levels.
ProGly NSAAs contain sugar molecules called glycans that confer precise control over the immune response to proteins. The glycans in ProGly NSAAs educate the immune system to recognize the underlying therapy as a “self” protein rather than a foreign protein, preventing an immune response. The technology is immediately extensible to a wide array of immunogenic therapies beyond uricase. ProGly therapies are also being developed to treat and prevent autoimmune disease without broadly suppressing the immune system by conferring highly specific tolerance to disease-causing autoantigens.
FinSMEs
21/07/2024