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Biotech startup Tome Biosciences emerged from stealth on Tuesday armed with with $213 million in funding from prominent investors and technology licensed from from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tome raised $213 million in Series A and B funding rounds from several investors, including ARCH Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz Bio + Heath, Fujifilm, Longwood Fund, Polaris Partners, Alexandria Venture Investments, Brucker Corporation and GV.
The startup aims to use programmable genomic integration (PGI) to “create healing and integrative mobile therapies. “According to Tome, PGI is a genetic sequence that is inserted into a user-defined location in the genome.
“PGI represents the maturation of editing technologies, breaking down existing barriers in genomic drug discovery,” Rahul Kakkar, Tome’s chief executive, said in a statement. “PGI is revolutionary because, after all, we can reprogram the human genome with elegance and power. into the unimaginable past.
Tome contends that the PGI technology combines the “site-specificity” of CRISPR/Cas9 with enzymes that can insert or write DNA sequences without the need for double-strand DNA breaks, according to Tuesday’s announcement. The technology is based on technology discovered by Tome’s co-founders, Johnathan Gootenberg and Omar Abudayyeh, while at MIT.
Tomé’s leadership team includes former Pandion Therapeutics CEO Rahul Kakkar, who will serve as Tome’s CEO, while Matt Barrows will serve as Lead Generation Officer. Barrows helped lead Moderna’s ramp-up production of its COVID-19 vaccine. Abudayyeh and Gootenberg will serve on Tome’s board of directors.
Patients with rare monogenic diseases can gain advantages from “potentially curative treatments” with PGI-based applicants with a drug compatible with the disease “regardless of genetic heterogeneity,” according to Kakkar.
“And for patients with more common disorders, PGI enables the creation of mobile treatments at the speed of biologics discovery with a complexity that allows for large-scale prospective use in human medicine,” Kakkar added.
So far, the company aims to create mobile and genetic cures, i. e. , genetic cures for monogenic liver diseases and mobile cures for autoimmune diseases. Tome has not fully revealed the prestige of these remedies. The company said it also received patents for its core technology.
“The ability to control where we insert DNA sequences is a game-changer. It means the field can now move away from random integration and utilize any natural promoter in the human genome, enabling us to orchestrate the tissue location, timing and amount of gene expression,” John Finn, Tome’s chief science officer, said in a statement.
While biotech investments and deals fell sharply in 2023, some startups raised the money they needed. Still, the industry will have raised $24 billion in venture capital on about 840 deals through the end of the year, a sharp drop from the previous three years, according to market insights firm PitchBook.
Tyler Patchen works at BioSpace. He can be reached at tyler. patchen@biospace. com. Follow him on LinkedIn.
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