The company, co-founded by Nobel Laureate Craig Mello, aims to push molecules for Huntington’s and a form of epilepsy into Phase I trials, with additional preclinical assets targeting Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Atalanta Therapeutics, a Boston-based biotechnology company focused on neurological diseases, announced Monday the completion of a $97 million series B financing round. The raise was co-led by the Dutch venture firm EQT Life Sciences and Sanofi’s venture capital arm, Sanofi Ventures.
The money will go toward Phase I clinical trials of the company’s RNAi therapies for a genetic form of childhood epilepsy and for Huntington’s disease. Each therapy targets and downregulates a gene involved in the progression of the target disease. The company’s other initial therapeutic areas include Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Atalanta launched four years ago with $110 million in backing from and collaboration with Biogen and Roche’s Genentech. This series B brings the total financing Atalanta has raised since its launch to $262 million, according to Atalanta’s statement.
Atalanta’s pipeline focuses on getting RNAi-based treatments into the nervous system and across the blood-brain barrier into the brain. Atalanta is banking on what it calls di-siRNA, which links two separate RNA molecules in the hopes of promoting persistence and slowing clearance in tissues.
“This financing validates the truly transformative potential of Atalanta’s best-in-class di-siRNA platform for delivering oligonucleotide therapies to the central nervous system and the exciting promise of our expansive wholly-owned pipeline,” Alicia Secor, Atalanta’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.
Despite being a Nobel Prize–winning discovery, RNAi has struggled to make an impact in the clinic, with only a handful of molecules winning FDA approval, with the first coming 2018 to treat amyloidosis. Most RNAi therapies on the market in the U.S. come from Alnylam, the largest company in the RNAi space.
One of Atalanta’s co-founders is University of Massachusetts professor Craig Mello, who received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Andrew Fire for discovering RNAi.
