Intellia Therapeutics, a Cambridge, MA-based new company formed to develop therapeutic products using CRISPR-Cas9 technology for gene editing and repair, closed a $15m Series A financing.
The round was led by Atlas Venture and Novartis.
Created by Atlas Venture and Caribou Biosciences, together with scientists who have pioneered the field of CRISPR biology, including Nessan Bermingham, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Intellia Therapeutics holds access to one of the most comprehensive intellectual property platforms available for the therapeutic use of CRISPR-Cas9, which harnesses the body’s natural DNA repair machinery to enable the repair, knockout or replacement of specific genes in the human genome.
The company is now advancing a broad pipeline toward clinical development, including ex vivo and in vivo approaches. Initial therapeutic focus is ex vivo applications, wherein cells are removed from the body (collected from blood or bone marrow), modified to correct disease-causing genes and returned to the patient for therapeutic benefit.
Near-term ex vivo applications include blood disorders, therapeutic protein production and cancer, focused on such approaches as CAR-T and checkpoint inhibitor regulation.
Intellia also initiated longer-term development of in vivo applications, administered either systemically or locally to correct genes residing within specific cells of the body. In vivo applications include ophthalmic, central nervous system (CNS), muscle, liver, anti-infective and other disease states.
In addition to Nessan Bermingham, Ph.D., the company is led by:
– Chief Scientific Officer Thomas Barnes, Ph.D., former Vice President of Discovery at Eleven Biotherapeutics;
– Chief Medical Officer John Leonard, M.D., former Chief Scientific Officer at AbbVie;
– Chief Technology Officer David Morrissey, Ph.D., former Head of siRNA at Novartis; and
– General Counsel José Rivera, former Divisional Vice President and Associate General Counsel, Intellectual Property Group at Abbott.
Beyond Bermingham, founders are:
– Rachel Haurwitz, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Caribou Biosciences;
– Andrew May, D. Phil., Chief Scientific Officer of Caribou Biosciences;
– Rodolphe Barrangou, Ph.D., Associate Professor at North Carolina State University;
– Erik Sontheimer, Ph.D., Professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School; and
– Luciano Marraffini, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Rockefeller University.
FinSMEs
19/11/2014