Sizable venture rounds from cardiac gene-editing company Verve Therapeutics and the retooled fusion protein maker Vera Therapeutics will push their lead therapies into and through the clinic over the next two years.
Sizable venture rounds from cardiac gene-editing company Verve Therapeutics and the retooled fusion protein maker Vera Therapeutics will push their lead therapies into and through the clinic over the next two years.
Verve, co-founded by CEO Sekar Kathiresan, announced a $94 million Series B round led by Wellington Management Company and co-led by Casdin Capital. Vera, formerly known as TrueCode Gene Repair, Inc. announced it had raised $80 million in a Series C round led by Abingworth LLP.
Verve’s financing comes a week after presenting data at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference demonstrating durable preclinical results for its lead gene editing therapy, VERVE-101, a combination base editor messenger RNA and guide RNA delivered just once via lipid nanoparticle to deactivate PCSK9 in the livers of in nonhuman primates with heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia.
The company also announced it had initiated IND-enabling studied and was on track for being clinical studied in 2022. The new funding will help advance VERVE-101 and the rest of Verve’s preclinical cardiovascular pipeline.
Research from Kathiresan, who was previously Director of the Center of Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and other Verve cofounders have laid the groundwork for a series of genetic medicine approaches to treating cardiovascular disease. Verve has now raised a total of $217 million in venture funding.
Meanwhile, Vera’s $80 million venture round will primarily advance its lead therapy, atacicept, into a Phase IIb trial in the rare autoimmune disease immunoglobulin A nephropathy, starting mid-2021. Atacicept, a recombinant fusion protein that targets the cytokines BLyS and APRIL, was licensed from Merck KGaA in November 2020.
In 2019, Vera – then known as TruCode – announced a $34 million venture round led by Kleiner Perkins and GV to advance a preclinical gene-editing pipeline. The company’s technology was an alternative to CRISPR-based gene editing that required double-stranded DNA breaks, using synthetic peptide nucleic acid oligomers and DNA correction sequences. Today’s announcement marks a pivot to developing therapeutics for immunological and inflammatory diseases, and the company has not disclosed the fate of its former pipeline.
Abingworth was joined in Vera’s Series C by Sofinnova Investments, Longitude Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Surveyor Capital (a Citadel company), Octagon Capital, Kleiner Perkins, GV and Alexandria Venture Investments.
For Verve’s Series B, Wellington and Casdin were joined by Redmile Group, Janus Henderson Investors, Cormorant Asset Management, Rock Springs Capital, Novo Holdings A/S, Logos Capital, Surveyor Capital (a Citadel company), RA Capital Management, GV, Biomatics and an unnamed healthcare-focused fund.
