The $300 million Series A financing round will support development of an all-RNA delivery platform, says ReNAgade.
Massachusetts-based start-up company ReNAgade claims its RNA platform combines delivery technologies, such as lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), with a wide range of coding, editing, and gene insertion tools to enable an all-RNA system to develop medicines.
With $300 million raised in a Series A financing round led by biotech investors MPM BioImpact and F2 Ventures, a spokesperson for ReNAgade told BioProcess Insider,“the funding will support us in continuing to build out our delivery platform with novel and comprehensive coding, editing, and insertion technologies.”
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In addition to this “we will also advance our science, including our early, promising in vivo data which we plan to share in future scientific forums.”
According to the firm, it is focused on addressing the limitations in RNA therapeutics by allowing the delivery of RNA medicines to access previously inaccessible tissues and cells in the human body.
“The need is to expand beyond the current limits of RNA medicines,” the spokesperson said.
“Genomic medicine is the next wave of innovation in biotech. The field of RNA medicine has the potential to rewrite the underlying basis of disease. However, the field of RNA medicine has not yet seen the development of therapies that can reach cells and tissues beyond the liver. We are aiming to address a major bottleneck in RNA therapeutics by enabling the delivery of RNA medicines to previously inaccessible tissues and cells in the body, substantially expanding the potential addressable disease market.”
Meanwhile, the company has partnered with Orna Therapeutics to combine ReNAgade’s delivery platform with Orna’s circular RNA technology. Orna collaborated with Merck & Co. (known as MSD outside of the US and Canada) in August 2022 to develop and commercialize vaccines and therapeutics targeting oncology and infectious diseases using circular RNA. ReNAgade claims the Merck deal includes technologies developed under its partnership with Orna.