Urania Therapeutics, a Strasbourg, France-based biopharmaceutical company specializing in the identification and development of ‘readthrough’ compounds, raised €3.53M ($3.89M) in seed funding.
The round was led by Advent France Biotechnology with participation from Cap Innov’Est.
The company intends to use the funds to consolidate its capabilities and optimize its proprietary compounds, enabling it to select drug candidates for further progress, to look at the translation from bench to bedside, from atomic-scale mechanistic understanding to discovering new drugs for unmet medical needs.
Created in 2015 by Jean-Paul Renaud, president and CSO, Urania Therapeutics, Urania Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company specializing in the identification and development of ‘readthrough’ compounds following a structure-based-drug design approach (SBDD). These compounds induce the overcoming of premature stop codons during protein synthesis to allow the production of missing full-length protein.
In restoring production of functional protein by targeting the decoding centre of the human ribosome, the aim is to provide new therapeutic options for a vast array of monogenic diseases, such as Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) and Cystic Fibrosis (CF), as well as certain cancer subtypes caused by nonsense mutations, a new illustration of precision medicine.
Scientific founders include ribosome structure experts Marat Yusupov and Gulnara Yusupova, CNRS research directors at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology (IGBMC) in Strasbourg, France.
FinSMEs
06/11/2019