GRO Biosciences, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotechnology company leveraging synthetic biology, has raised $60.3 million in Series B funding.
The round, which totals more than $90 million, 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, managing director at Access Biotechnology, joined the company’s board of directors.
The company plans to use the funds to advance its lead program for the treatment of refractory gout into the clinic, expand its GRObio pipeline, and extend its Genome Recoded Organism (GRO) platform for scalable production of therapeutics incorporating multiple non-standard amino acids (NSAA).
GRO Biosciences, led by CEO Dan Mandell, is advancing a lead program called ProGly-Uricase, which is being developed as a treatment for severe and intractable gout, a type of arthritis in which excess uric acid buildup causes debilitating inflammation in the joints.
ProGly-Uricase is a proprietary uricase enzyme incorporating the company’s ProGly NSAA to prevent the emergence of ADA and enable patients with severe, refractory gout to achieve effective long-term control of serum uric acid levels.
ProGly NSAA contains sugar molecules called glycans that precisely control the immune response to proteins. The glycans in ProGly NSAA educate the immune system to recognize the underlying therapeutic as a “self” protein rather than a foreign protein, thus preventing an immune response. This technology can be readily extended to a range of immunogenic therapeutics beyond uricase. ProGly therapeutics are also being developed to treat and prevent autoimmune diseases without broadly suppressing the immune system by conferring highly specific tolerance to disease-causing self-antigens.
Finance Small and Medium Enterprises
July 21, 2024
