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Purespring Therapeutics Raises £80M in Series B Round to Launch Kidney Disease Gene Therapy Trial

NEW YORK – Purespring Therapeutics on Wednesday announced that it has raised £80 million ($105 million) in an oversubscribed Series B financing round, which it plans to use to initiate a Phase I/II trial of its lead gene therapy program PS-002.

The Series B round was led by Sofinnova Partners in collaboration with Gilde Healthcare, Forbion, British Patient Capital, and founding investor Syncona.

London-based Purespring will use the funds to advance the pipeline of gene therapies that it is developing for kidney diseases, including the company's PS-002, an adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector-based gene therapy designed to treat IgA nephropathy (IgAN), also known as Berger disease, a chronic disease in which immunoglobulin A accumulates in the kidneys.

IgAN is in some cases hereditary, and researchers have identified possible genetic markers linked with the condition. In fact, IgAN has an estimated heritability of 40 percent to 50 percent, according to a paper published last year in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, and genome-wide association studies have identified more than 30 risk loci for IgAN.

Purespring's AAV gene therapy platform enables functional copies of genes to be delivered to podocytes, cells implicated in many renal diseases, to replace defective genes or modulate protein production.

"Nearly one-tenth of the world's population, around 840 million people, suffer from chronic kidney disease," Purespring CEO Julian Hanak said in a statement. "For many of them, there are few options beyond dialysis and transplantation. Our novel treatment platform and deep understanding of kidney disease puts us in a position to stop, reverse, and even cure kidney disease. The funds raised will allow us to bring our novel treatments to patients in the clinic."