NEW YORK – RNA-editing company AIRNA this week said it closed an oversubscribed $60 million financing round, bringing its total Series A funding to $90 million.
The financing round was led by venture capital firm Forbion. Existing investors Arch Venture Partners and ND Capital also participated in the round, as did new investors, including Ono Venture Investment and Alexandria Venture Investments.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based AIRNA will use the proceeds to advance its lead product candidate for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD), an inherited genetic disease caused by mutations in the SERPINA1 gene, into clinical trials and to develop its pipeline of preclinical therapies. "We are focused on bringing our first drug candidate to the clinic next year, and advancing our platform to unlock targets that are inaccessible by other modalities," AIRNA President and CEO Kris Elverum said in a statement.
AIRNA launched last year with backing from Arch Venture Partners to develop therapeutics using its RNA-editing platform RESTORE+, which is based on approaches developed by the company's academic cofounders, Thorsten Stafforst, a professor at University of Tübingen in Germany, and Jin Billy Li, a professor at Stanford University in the US.