Aera Tx launches with $193m in financing for genetic meds

Boston-based biotech Aera Therapeutics has announced that it has launched with $193 million in financing – raised from Series A and B financings from leading life sciences investors ARCH Venture Partners, GV, and Lux Capital – to enable and advance the next generation of transformative genetic medicines.

Founded by Dr Feng Zhang – core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, McGovern Institute Investigator, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute – the company’s proprietary delivery platform, based on endogenous human proteins, offers the potential to enable genetic medicines across a broad range of modalities and therapeutic areas.

Aera’s proprietary protein nanoparticle (PNP) genetic medicine delivery platform is based on research conducted in Zhang’s laboratory and is designed to address the limitations of today’s delivery technologies in order to more broadly enable new genetic medicines. It leverages the discovery of endogenous, human proteins derived from retroelements that can self-assemble to form capsid-like structures and which can package and transfer nucleic acid cargo.

Combining the benefit of an endogenous, self-assembling system with the engineerability of a protein-based system, it is said to have the potential to enable the delivery of various genetic medicine modalities.

Aera’s technology also includes a licensed therapeutic enzyme platform based on the discovery of novel, compact, and programmable gene editing enzymes. The compact size is thought to help overcome the packaging and delivery challenges of current gene editor systems.

Dr Akin Akinc, chief executive officer of Aera, said: “Genetic medicines – comprising both a payload and a delivery system – are powerful modalities with wide-ranging therapeutic applications for the treatment of human disease; however, the advancement of delivery technologies has lagged [behind] the rapid evolution of payload technologies, limiting the broad application of genetic medicines.”

Akinc continued: “Challenges remain with current delivery approaches, and genetic medicines applications have been generally restricted to the liver and ex vivo settings. Aera’s goal is to change this. With access to enabling delivery and payload technology, we aim to expand the reach of genetic medicines to different tissues and applications to benefit more patients across more disease areas.”

On the board of directors with Akinc are: Dr John Maragnore, board chair and former founding chief executive officer at Alnylam; Robert Nelsen, managing director of ARCH Venture Partners; Issi Rozen, board observer and venture partner at GV; Dr Vicki Sato, former president of Vertex Pharmaceuticals; Dr David Schenkein, general partner at GV; and John Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner at Lux Capital.

Maragnore commented: “We have long understood the potential of genetic medicines – which includes modalities such as RNAi, mRNA, gene therapy, and gene editing – to revolutionise the way we treat disease. However, delivery challenges remain and we have yet to come to realise the full promise of these potentially transformative therapies.”

He added: “Aera’s endogenous human PNP platform represents an exciting new approach for the delivery of genetic medicines.”

Meanwhile, another company looking into new genetic medicines is Cardior, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company exploring the applications of non-coding RNA-based drugs in cardiovascular disease. The company is on a mission to prevent and reverse cardiac disfunction using this novel therapeutic category, which is able to address multi-focal pathways to disease treatment. Watch the video of pharmaphorum editor-in-chief Jonah Comstock’s discussion on the topic with Cardior’s CEO Claudia Ulbrich here.